Subject: Re: unix font handling and printing under utf-8 locale
From: Vlad Harchev (hvv@hippo.ru)
Date: Tue Jan 30 2001 - 14:04:13 CST
On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
Hi guys,
> Hi Tomas,
>
> I'll buy you several beers if you do this :)
>
> One of the problems is that AbiWord ships its own fonts instead of using the
> X-fonts that are available on the server. This is a cause of *lots* of
> problems in Gnome's and RedHat's bug databases. Of course, changing it will
> also open up some new bugs, but I'll be more than happy to slay those.
>
> The next problem I see is that (IIRC) not all X fonts are printable ;(
>
> A major problem of ours is the way we currently generate PS. We dump our
> shipped font's AFMs into the generated PS code headers at the start of every
> page. We also rely upon these shipped fonts for drawing to the Display. This
> is bad and you don't need to do this to generate valid printable PS. It is
> also keeping us from XP PS export, which would be a neat feature on all of
> our platforms.
I think that XP PS export is not worth the efforts (it's easy achievable on
Windows say by installing fake PS printer, and asking to print to file when
printing to that printer to get almost reasonable .PS; same should be
possible on all platforms that can use .PS for anything meaningful).
> If you compare the results of our PS driver with, say, GnomePrint's, you'll
> notice that the GP one is infinitely smaller because it doesn't include the
> font-metrics in its output.
>
> So, hopefully, this is proof enough that we are doing something wrong. Aaron
> knows and really likes PS, IIRC, so he might be a valuable resource if you
> want to re-write the PS driver. I wrote parts of GnomePrint, so I might be
> able to help out there too. Also, there's irc.gnome.org#gnome-print where
> you can ask the current maintainers for help if you need it.
We should provide an option - whether to dump all needed afms/pfms into .ps
file when printing to .ps. Then our .ps files can even be better than
gnome-print ones.
And also I would like to return back the ability to print to .ps in gnome
port - it's too severe to force users to use only unstable gnome-print.
Also, it still would be nice to make AW full supporting TTFs (even with
non-unicode ttf fonts).
Best regards,
-Vlad
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Jan 30 2001 - 15:08:10 CST