Re: [ft] Parsing AFM files without PFA/PFB

[Antony Lee]

Thanks for the quick reply.
Antony Lee

On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 3:51 PM Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:

>
> > Does FreeType provide a way to parse an AFM file and extract the
> > corresponding glyph metrics and kerning information, when the
> > accompanying PFA/PFB file is not present?
>
> No.
>
> > One use case is Matplotlib's postscript backend, which can layout
> > glyphs just based on their metrics but does not need the pfa/pfb
> > files itself.  Right now Matplotlib uses its own handwritten AFM
> > parser, but it would be nice if FreeType's AFM support could be used
> > instead.
>
> Well, FreeType is a *rendering* library, i.e., its main goal is to
> produce bitmaps.  Scanning AFM files alone is completely useless for
> FreeType; for this reason there isn't a separate API to access the
> metrics data.
>
>
>     Werner
>