Subject: Re: unix font handling and printing under utf-8 locale
From: Vlad Harchev (hvv@hippo.ru)
Date: Wed Jan 31 2001 - 09:27:49 CST
On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> At 11:49 PM +0400 1/30/01, Vlad Harchev wrote:
> > As I understand, CJK guys use only TTFs for scalable fonts (they don't use
> >Type1 fonts since they are ~10Mb each due to their format).
>
> Actually, there are some really good quality Type 1/CID CJK
> fonts that are used in professional publishing. However, I suspect
> that you won't find those on most Unix boxes.
>
>
> > So presumably
> >there exist patches for Xfree and/or vairous font servers to support ttfs with
> >more than 256 glyphs.
>
> I am pretty sure that the new XFree will handle Unicode
> TTF's, since it uses FreeType to do all the heavy lifting.
Tomas said it can use only 1st 256 glyphs...
>
> > Also, CJK people use only TTF fonts when printing to PS,
>
> Why wouldn't they use them elsewhere? I'm confused here...
Hmm, AW in CKJ mode uses only TTFs for everything. What you were confused by?
>
> >but no fonts/afms are emitted into .ps in CJK mode since TTF fonts are already
> >registered in ghostscript.
>
> I don't believe that CJK TTFs are registered by GS, but I am
> willing to be proven wrong on this one.
As CJK hackers told, it's a truth. Their GS is hacked of course.
>
> > Having ability to print using TTFs would be handy though.
>
> Yup!
>
>
> > You first should be able to register your fonts in GS. Just see Fontmap file
> >that comes with it and add more entries of the same form. It should just work.
>
> That's only useful if you are printing through GS. If you
> are going direct to a PS printer then it won't help.
>
BTW, are there any printers out there supporting TTFs?
> > Then we should code for AW not to include afms and pfms of fonts into .ps for
> >some subset of fonts.
>
> Or we should only include them once - not for each page!
Of course. Do you have any ideas how to achieve this?
>
> >For TTFs - I think we could query Xserver for all this
> >information (even using gdk), but for very big font size (say 200 pixels) to
> >make rounding errors smaller.
>
> Or linking against FreeType.
>
>
> >Well, that's it. Currently in CJK mode
> >information about glyphs dimensions is specified via special syntax of
> >fonts.dir (ascent, descent are encoded in XLFD in CJK mode - see
> >XAP_UnixFontManager::_allocateCJKFont()).
>
> In which case FT would handle it automatically for us - and
> not have to special case.
Do you mean it understands those extended CJK XLFDs?
>
> Leonard
Best regards,
-Vlad
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