Kaixo!

On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 05:12:32PM +0200, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> 
> Just to let yyou know of a problem with the Type1 fonts in the package

Yes.
The font are wrong, they use iso8859-1 names instead of iso8859-8 ones.

That is the reason why I supplied a file microsoft-win3.1.enc with tons
of aliases; to allow those incorrect fonts to still be used on display.

However, it seems that for Type1 fonts the encoding is handled internally;
no matter what I put in the enc file the result is this the same... (are *.enc
files are no longer used for Type1 fonts? or I need to restart X or something?)

Anyway, it would be better to fix the fonts; so not only they will work
in X11 again, but they will be usable for printing in Hebrew too (currently
they are only usable to print in iso-8859-1)

> Thanks to Yedidyah Bar-David, I had the exact details where the problem
> happens and where not, and examples of working fonts.
> 
> I downloaded the fonts, and compared attribute-by-attribute, till I
> found the cause:
> 
> It seems that sometime between the old distros of Linux with their old
> versions of XF86, the Type1 encoding changed. Instead of agrave,
> aacute, acircumflex, etc., the names of the 8bit characters became
> cryptic (afii57664, etc.).

No, the Type1 encoding did not changed; it is just that now Type1 fonts
are no longer limited to latin1 ones.

> After putting these cryptic names,
> everything worked great (but stopped to work under other platforms and
> fonts editors and tools...).

Other platforms and fonts editors should be fixed then. issue bug reports.

It sure works with pfaedit when right names are used.

> I don't have any clue what standard these names are based on; It is not

Adobe defines those names.

> supported by other UNIXes, by font editors (such as Fontographer),

Any good font editor support them.
However, you must tell the font editor that you want a *Hebrew* font, and
not an European font.

> I'm afraid that I'll have to supply a special set of fonts, dedicated

I'll be very pleased to use a set of fixed fonts, if they are available.

> for Linux, because after this change, the fonts will not work with
> other UNIXes.

That means those other Unixes don't support Hebrew Postscript fonts at
all then.

You can cheat and claim you don't use Hebrew but English or German,
and use an iso8859-1 font (even if you name it iso8859-8, and if it has
some weird glyphs that happen to look like Hebrew letters more than
lowercase accented latin ones); but that is and remains a dirty hack.
A system needing that simply does not have Hebrew support.

I'll expect any system with real Hebrew support (including RTL) will not
only support correctly encoded Hebrew fonts, but also *require* them.

> Does anybody have any idea why XF86 moved to a non-standard encoding?!

It is standard.

It is just that it finaly gets supported and working, after years and years
of it being unsuported.

> P.S.  For people who are waiting for the patched fonts: I believe that
> they will be available in a few days; I'll announce it here.

Thanks.


[PS: I Cc: to [EMAIL PROTECTED] as I'm worried that I can't force trough
editing *.enc files to recode the fonts as I wish...]

-- 
Ki �a vos v�ye b�n,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/            PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975

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