[ft-devel] Re: Truetype Collection fonts

[Deron Kazmaier]

First, sorry for the poor information. I was working on the project 
before Christmas and started writing a note to outline my problem and 
sent when I should have saved...

The application should do the conversion. But it doesn't, and the 
application programmer has to fix it. So I am :-) The thought I had was 
that since FreeType is reading this information already, that instead of 
reproducing that functionality some way might exist to use freetype to 
normalize the issue. For example, creating a Type42 from a TrueType font 
I use a technic that is much like lilypond uses (thanks for the pointer 
Werner Lemberg). Which is the kind of solutions I am looking for.

The problems are related but not the same. One was reading out the font 
from a Mac resource fork to output a TrueType to PDF or Type1 to either 
PDF or PostScript. I know that FreeType does this in ftmac.c but the raw 
data is not available in a public interface.

The other problem is outputting to PDF from a TrueType font collection, 
ie parsing out the specific font. This also falls under a bigger 
umbrella of subsampling a larger font.

Hopefully I have provided a less confusing set of details. Thanks for 
any hints for solving these problems with FreeType if possible.

Deron


> On Fri, 2007-12-21 at 16:40, Deron Kazmaier wrote:
>   
> > I need to extract PDF/PS embeddable fonts from a ttc 
> >     
> I find this a little confusing -- generally the software that produces
> the pdf should be capable of doing the conversion.
>
> However, if you really mean a font that can be dumped into a PDF the
> thing that would make most sense would be a type42 PostScript font --
> that is basically a PostScript wrapper around the basic truetype tables.
> It's not a very useful item because you will lose kerning info, ligature
> info, etc. -- PDF files don't need those data as the application that
> creates the PDF does all that stuff to the glyph stream stored in the
> file and just leaves the font containing the data to draw a glyph.
>
> Or does your PDF generator not like TTC files and you just want a ttf?
>
> Or do you want a type1 font? (this is another thing that can be dumped
> directly into a PDF, but here the kerning data gets stored in a separate
> file).
>
>   
> > (plus Mac font suitcase, but that is a bit different beast).
> >     
> Extracting all the ttfs in the ttc and putting them in a single mac
> suitcase? Or just one by one? 
>
> TTC files allow various optimizations to be done that can reduce file
> size greatly. You will lose that in another format.
>   
> >   Anyone with a  suggestion 
> > on where to start? Would I be well served to use some FreeType internals 
> > or roll something independent?
> >     
> FontForge ( http://fontforge.sf.net/ ) can do all these conversions.
> FontLab also (but it costs real money). Doubtless there are others.
>
>   FreeType is designed to read and rasterize fonts. It doesn't have
> conversion in mind, and while conversion could be done with FreeType it
> would be a lot of coding on your part.
>
>
>