Re: [Freetype] Help with font improvement

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

VP> AFAIK you can include embedded bitmaps into TrueType fonts, too.

Yes.  I was pointing out the advantages of OTF/CFF over Type 1.

VP> BTW: when we would get rid of .pcf and .bdf fonts in X?

You're not reading enough mailing lists ;-)

                                        Juliusz
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From: Juliusz Chroboczek <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: [Fonts]Will 4.3.0 get rid of 8bit bitmap fonts?
To: address@hidden
Date: 19 Dec 2002 18:59:41 +0100

MH> There has been much discussion in the past of getting rid of the 
MH> ISO8859-* bitmap fonts generated by ucs2any et al.  The last 
MH> discussion I recall on this was that ttf font file format would 
MH> be used with embedded bitmaps.  Is this still planned for 4.3.0?

I'm far from ready.  Here's the things that remain to be done, in no
particular order:

  1. find somebody who can debug Windows to find out why the fonts
     generated by fonttootf don't work on that platform;
  2. modify fonttootf to properly generate font-level metrics (they are
     currently hardwired for fixed);
  3. modify mkfontscale to generate bitmap entries for bitmap fonts;
  4. modify the FreeType backend to do reasonable things with bitmap
     entries.

I need help for 1 -- I'm just not competent to deal with it.  2. is
simple but tedious, and will require hacking at FreeType to get access
to BDF properties.  3 is ready in my private tree (I'll probably want
to rework it), 4 is really not difficult.

Additionally, I'll probably want to modify the FreeType backend to
discard faces associated to open fonts when they've not been used for
some time.

                                        Juliusz