Re: [Freetype] discerning encodings in ttf

[Alexei Podtelezhnikov]

Hi!

So at the moment we have the following unanswered questions. What would be the 
way for ttf developers to set up their fonts so that it's _easy_ for users to 
use them in open source comminity? What would be the way for the users to 
set them up? Read on...

It's good that you brough up CJK fonts. Here is the most well-known kochi used 
by Debian and RedHat at least:
http://www.on.ics.keio.ac.jp/~yasu/linux/fonts/
They are beautiful in Japanese range, but they are horrible in Latin and 
Cyrillic ones. It's too much to ask from the developer of this _huge_ set to be 
just as artistic in the ranges where he is simply not interested in. He did 
the proper OS/2 tables recently. That's enough. Now, how can users easily use 
them? No good tool for generating fonts.dir and fonts.scale exist. They all 
ignore OS/2 tables.

Bottom line is that the set up can only be done be an experience person and one 
has to be present in case we want to add other fonts to the directory. Nothing 
can be done automatically. I am complaining because I don't enjoy beautiful 
Japanese, I suffer from horrible Cyrillic here. And I blame freetype for not 
being able to ignore Cyrillic which is properly marked out. Well, not freetype 
itself, but whoever uses it. How do I have them ignored step by step in the 
present framework.

* So basically, a lot of people would like to see some HOWTO from freetype.
* Second question: who else but you I can complain to? 
* RFE: more advanced freetype utilities are needed bad

I'm addressing this questions to you because you are the most 
knowledgeble ones in the open source community. Anyway, 
overall, good job guys! Just some minor issues... At the moment I use 
power and just ignore Japanese users by not installing kochi.

Thanks,
Alexei

PS. I'll try to find time to add OS/2 reverence to ftdump.



 

Antoine Leca said in response:

Alexei Podtelezhnikov wrote:
> 
> TTF can not only provide numerous charsets/encodings, but also specify
> which of them are supposed to be used.

I disagree.

Beside the fact that the informations in the 'OS/2' table are often
incorrect and/or misleading, as Werner pointed out, I cannot see how
you can determine, for example, what encoding you should use to
represent a determinate CJK text (of course, all the encodings are
to be assumed to end up with the same string of glyph ids; but the
specs do not ensure that).


> Windows font property extention is capable of giving this info.
> What would be an analog functionality (set of functions or
> demo/util) in freetype?

A new library named Unitype (which stands a level higher than Freetype 2).
This is a just beginning project, feel free to join it if you have
resources to share with us!

 
Antoine