Around 18 o'clock on Sep 29, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> Is there already a way to use pixel fonts with render? For some > applications (terminal emulators with small glyphs most notably, e.g. > popular with programmers and sys-admins), bitmap fonts will always be > preferable over TrueType fonts. Please do not neglect them in any future > font architectures. Xft provides core-font access, and Render permits non-AA fonts to be used. FreeType2 can access PCF files, but I'm thinking of either using BDF or creating a new binary format as PCF is quite broken for larger fonts. Any such would be usable via render. I think Xft currently skips bitmapped fonts in FreeType, but that should be easy to fix. > Some of the "legacy encoding" compactness could be easily given to > ISO10646-1 XLFD fonts if the font subrange mechanism would finally be > implemented for BDF and PCF fonts as well. Then an application could load > out of a full ISO10646-1 font easily only say the Ethiopic collection, > for example as in The problem isn't in font access, it's in font querying. Applications need to select fonts containing the glyphs in the document. XLFD names for fonts in ISO10646-1 don't contain any information about coverage, leaving applications guessing or resorting to private databases (as Mozilla does). The advantage of the legacy encodings is that applications can be relatively certain that the named font covers all (or at least most) of the specified encoding. Fixing BDF/PCF fonts to perform subsetting would be relatively easy, would that it were actually useful... > I think finally implementing the subset mechanism for BDF/PCF would > provide the cheapest and most effective improvement that can be done on > the XFontStruct front for ISO10646-1 fonts. It's hard to imagine how subsetting will help; few applications know the complete range of glyphs they'll use ahead of time. Of course, they could examine the locale and guess, but that's expecting a lot from the developers when the easy solution is just to load the whole font. [EMAIL PROTECTED] XFree86 Core Team SuSE, Inc. _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
