On Fri, 11 May 2001, Cyrille Chepelov wrote:
> Le Fri, May 11, 2001, � 10:33:27AM -0500, Lars Clausen a �crit:
>
>> I disagree on this; I think we should get some better font support soon,
>> even if it means that some documents will use replacement fonts when
>> moved between machines. PostScript output can just have the font
>> embedded.
>
> How do you retrieve the PS fonts' outlines ? (assuming we'll let TTF
> aside for the moment) ? How do you even ask the font serving service (I'm
> deliberately avoiding the term "font server", for obvious reasons) for
> where the file are stored, or if that service is not located on the same
> machine as dia or as the display, how do you download these files ?
[...]
I did a little digging, and found the FreeType library
<URL:www.freetype.org>. It allows manipulating various vector font
formats, including Type 1 and TrueType. It's very portable and most Linux
distributions have it. I haven't found anything yet about rendering to
PostScript, but I found a TrueType to Type 1 converter library
<URL:http://ttf2pt1.sourceforge.net> that could give us the code if we
need.
Given that this would add another library dependence, I think it should be
optional, but I'm willing to put some time into getting it up. Not for
this release, obviously, but definitely before 1.0.
I haven't looked into how well it works, but it sounds better than waiting
for Pango and the like.
I've seen installations (BSD's in particular) that didn't have all the
standard PostScript fonts for X, so only a few font selections were
available. Is that better than just using the X fonts and risk worse
printing?
-Lars
--
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause) | H�rdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I | Retainer of Sir Kegg
will defend to the death your right to say it." | of Westfield
--Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire | Chaos Berserker of Khorne
