Re: [Devel] Supported Compression Algorithms.

[Albert Chin]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 05:33:33PM -0600, address@hidden wrote:
> I'm sorry if this is an old thread, but I'm trying to get
> Keith Packards FontConfig package to work on AIX.
> It doesn't seem to recognize the bitmap fonts that are
> compressed with the standard UNIX compress program.
> It does work fine if I uncompress the fonts or compress
> them with gzip.  Looking through the code this seems to be
> more related to Freetype than FontConfig.
> 
> I am somewhat familiar with the LZW patent issues.  However
> I thought the gzip or zlib code which is included in Freetype2
> could uncompress these files (but patent issues only prevents the
> use of LZW to compress files).

As far as I know, the patent issues cover *compression*. Gzip has LZW
decompression support. Any system with .pcf.Z fonts has the same
problem as AIX (Solaris, IRIX, Tru64 UNIX, etc.).

The problem is 100% related to FreeType. To fix it, you need to make
LZW changes akin to src/gzip/*.

I'm currently trying to fix this now. Do you know of an LZW
decompression implementation compatible with the FreeType license? I'm
using the unlzw.c file from gzip (though it's BSD-licensed) as a proof
of concept at the moment. No ETA though.

-- 
albert chin (address@hidden)