Re: [Devel] anybody working for TrueTypeGX / other Macintosh bitmap font support?

[George Williams]

> Unfortunately, Apple has switched to OpenType before Japanese font
> vendors decide to provide cheap TrueTypeGX fonts for Macintosh, so
> it's difficult to know which extensions (mort/morx? fvar? trak? opti?)
Apple wants people to switch from mort to morx. Both are currently in 
wide use (at least in latin fonts). I've never noticed a font with an 
'fvar' table (I just like the idea).

I haven't noticed 'trak' tables used, but I haven't really been looking 
for them so I might just have ignored them.

By 'opti' do you mean 'opbd'? I haven't noticed these used either.

the open source font editor PfaEdit (http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/) 
supports
        feat
        kern
        lcar
        morx
        opbd
        prop
(it will read 'mort' tables, but always produces 'morx' on output). If 
that's any indication of usage.

> >    * An NFNT (FONT) resource does not contain an easy way of
> >determining whether any given collection of bytes is in fact an NFNT.
> Please let me know more about the first problem you found. It means
> that we cannot know a given character is included in a given NFNT
> before accessing glyph bitmap table?
My understanding of the way freetype works is that the font's data is 
passed to all drivers loaded into freetype until one is found that 
"recognizes" the font format. For instance the opentype driver 
recognizes fonts that begin with 'OTTO'. I am not aware of any easy way 
to look at an NFNT resource and determine that it is an 'NFNT'. I need 
to talk to Werner about a way to get around what I perceive to be a 
problem. Parsing the data is not particularly hard...

> By the way, I've already written a script to dump NFNT (FON"D")
> content,
> but yet nothing for "FONT" resource which I heard as original bitmap
> font format of Macintosh.
The 'FONT' resource is in exactly the same format as the 'NFNT', so 
getting them working should be easy. You never see them any more though.