Re: Merging TTF files? [FreeType]

[Terry Hancock]

Antoine Leca wrote:
> Terry Hancock wrote:

> > "Free Type Layout", maybe?
> 
> Yes. It is soon to be announced, I think. It is the next step.
> This point is rather directed more toward David Turner than you,
> as you might have guessed.
> 

> >
> > Another question would be whether this should perhaps
> > be handled by the application.  Yudit, as I said, appears
> > to do this with X11 fonts.  If the interface to FreeType
> > is similar enough, maybe the easiest solution would be
> > to modify the Yudit source.
> 
> Well, FreeType (on X11) is not easy to access for an application
> like Yudit... And it requires some access to internal datas
> if you want to do something more elaborate than what is
> currently available with any X11 font.

I'm not sure we're communicating here:  I meant, "since
Yudit already uses an overload strategy to load X11 fonts,
maybe it could use the same strategy to load TrueType
fonts".  In particular, Yudit uses TrueType fonts directly,
it doesn't use a TrueType/X11 server and I'm not proposing
thar.  Mr. Sinai says in his documentation that he 
wanted Yudit to be independent of the machine's "locale" 
setting, so he accesses the font files directly.  I'm
actually not even sure it uses the X11 font server (it
may access the X11 fonts directly -- I don't really
know how to tell the difference, as my understanding
of this subject is weak).

> > In either case, one would have to sense when the font
> > had "given up" and returned a default character, instead
> > of a correctly formatted character (it'd be nice if
> > the FreeType API would let you figure this out).
> 
> Good point. Can you make it public on the mailing list,
> at least for the record.
> This affects more FTL rather than current library, I believe,
> but there are some intrincaties beyond that.
> 
> > Or else, one could simply define ranges for each font
> > (i.e. don't overload, just use an outside code page
> > mapping file to tell which ranges come from which font).
> 
> This is the easy way, but it has holes. And it is a big
> burden on users.

I'm not sure.  It's also very powerful for users.  It occurs
to me that the user could do their own remapping in this
layer without all the trouble inherent in editing the
original TrueType files.

> > Or maybe this should be a thin layer between FreeType
> > and the application -- i.e. just capture requests
> > and remap them to the appropriate font via FreeType?
> > This would seem to favor the code page tables approach.
> 
> FTL is something like that, in spirit.
> 
> > The point is, I'm willing to make a contribution to
> > fix "my personal itch" on this, but I'd like to find the
> > right leverage point to do it.  Also the point where
> > it would be most helpful to others as well as me (no
> > point in wasting effort). Maybe I need to read the API
> > docs for FreeType?
> 
> If you are willing to contribute on this area, I believe
> the best idea is to take a look at the interface of
> FreeType 2 in the current state of art, then look
> around for the alternate solutions (MS's Uniscribe, Omega,
> Pango, Apple's WorldScript,... in no particular order),
> then contribute since the beginning to FTL. IMHO, of course.
> This will be announced on devel@ rather on address@hidden, BTW
> 
> Antoine

There's also something called "vflib" which is supposed
to serve a variety of different kinds of fonts.  It's
targeted at Japanese users, though, and may be too
specialized.

I am, of course, interested in Free Software/Open Source
solutions -- there are apparently ways to solve this
problem provided I'm willing to migrate to Windows and
purchase Microsoft software, but, well, let's just say
it's not an option. ;)

Omega is somewhat promising.  That's the other route --
just use X11 fonts in Yudit (possibly even use a 
TrueType to X11 server or converter to use the same
fonts), then use a separate utility with Type1 fonts
(possibly also converted from TrueType originals) to
print.  This would be a LOT higher maintenance, though.

The only justification for it, is that I'm probably
going to want to use Omega at some point anyway.  But
I'm not sure that's a good enough reason, even so. :)

Regarding FTL -- it would be really nice if it "looked
like" FreeType to the application -- then you wouldn't
have to recompile the application in order to use it. 
Failing that, maybe it should just be a work-alike with
the application needing to be recompiled with a different
shared-library binding.  Hmm.  Well, I can't really
say any more until I've looked at the documentation.

-- 
Terry Hancock
address@hidden