Re: Mission statement and Knuth-Plass reconsidered

[John Gardner]

Hi Deri,

I understand the main problem with type 1 fonts is the 256 glyph
> restriction with pdfs, there is no such restriction in the font itself, I
> have Japanese type 1 fonts with more than 18000 glyphs which can be used in
> pdfs. Type 1 is dumber than more modern formats, but the glyphs themselves
> are the result of stroked  paths, just the same, it means that the
> intelligence has to be in the software rather than the font itself.
> Attached is the Japanese version of the groff.7 man page produced by groff.
>

No, I wasn't referring to Groff's PDF/font handling, but rather, that of
the software that generated and/or processed tb69thanh.pdf (which clearly
wasn't Troff-generated). (I'm aware that custom encoding vectors can
alleviate the headaches involved with subsetting large typefaces).

(Apologies for the semi-tangent)
— J

On Wed, 24 May 2023 at 09:57, Deri <deri@chuzzlewit.myzen.co.uk> wrote:

> On Tuesday, 23 May 2023 23:49:05 BST John Gardner wrote:
> > The embedded typeface (both in the original PDF and Deri's version) are
> > encoded in Type 1 format. Given the constraints of that particular font
> > format, it wouldn't surprise me if the conversion from TeX's font-format
> > (whatever the hell it is) was a crude one. Type 1 font files are also
> > limited to 255 characters, so robust character sets need to be stored in
> > multiple separate "fonts" (which would explain the hideous kerning of
> > "Žena" and "Můj").
>
> I don't think either version is original. The first file had been
> processed by
> ghostscript and we know that the original was produced on pdftex so
> ghostscript would not be in the workflow. The second was produced by
> pdftex-0.14h which is roughly contemporaneous with the thesis, but it also
> records that it was modified 3 years ago, and it claims to be pdf 1.6,
> which
> was not around in 2001.
>
> I understand the main problem with type 1 fonts is the 256 glyph
> restriction
> with pdfs, there is no such restriction in the font itself, I have
> Japanese
> type 1 fonts with more than 18000 glyphs which can be used in pdfs. Type 1
> is
> dumber than more modern formats, but the glyphs themselves are the result
> of
> stroked  paths, just the same, it means that the intelligence has to be in
> the
> software rather than the font itself. Attached is the Japanese version of
> the
> groff.7 man page produced by groff.
>
> The weird Můj is because in the pdf it strokes "Brno - M" followed by the
> ring
> glyph after which it jumps back and draws the "u". The problem is that it
> jumps back a little too far, so this is an error in the computation of the
> distance to jump backwards, rather than using a type 1 font.
>
> Cheers
>
> Deri
>
>
>