Dear Eli,
I am sorry I have missed the beginning of this discussion; I hope I'm
not repeating things that have already been said.
I am the person who implemented on-the-fly font recoding in XFree86
4.0, which is what you are complaining about. Please read the
``README.fonts'' document for a rationale.
EM> For example, Netscape 2/3/4 agreed to download only fonts which it
EM> "recognized" their encodings. And "8859-8" was not among them
EM> (even by using "User-Defined").
What are you speaking about? Netscape 2/3/4 has no support whatsoever
for downloading Type 1 fonts.
EM> In any case, we didn't discuss this issue, but another thing:
EM> The DICT encoding attribute of the Type1 files.
What is the ``DICT encoding attribute''? Are you speaking of the font
dictionary's ``/Encoding'' entry? XFree86 4.0 will respect its value
if the font is declared as ``-adobe-fontspecific''; the way this works
has not changed since X11R5.
EM> I just know that hundreds, or even thousands, UNIX and Linux
EM> users, have used these fonts for years. Until they stopped to
EM> work suddenly
X11 has been broken w.r.t. international Type 1 fonts since X11R5.
XFree86 4.0 fixes support for such fonts.
Unfortunately, a number of fonts have been designed to work around the
limitations of X11R5. Workarounds for using such fonts in XFree86 4.0
are indicated in the README.fonts document.
EM> a long-years-standard that STOPPED to work.
No. You're talking about a well-established bug workaround that is no
longer needed.
I am sorry that this fix broke compatibility; we did discuss ways of
being correct while preserving compatibility, but we didn't find a
satisfactory solution, which is why we decided to just do the right
thing.
The glyph names used by the Type 1 backend are defined by an Adobe
standard, with a few changes for compatibility with X11R5 (e.g. U+0027
maps to a closing quotation mark rather than a vertical apostrophe,
U+00B5 maps to "mu1" rather than "mu"). All the local changes are in
the ASCII (``Basic Latin'') and Latin-1 ranges, as this is the subset
of Unicode supported by the Type 1 backend in X11R5.
EM> And this is not the issue of this thread, but just the issue of why
EM> "agrave" and its friends are not supported anymore.
Could you clarify this? /agrave and friends are perfectly supported
in all encodings that include the associated character -- but as far
as I know, there's no LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE in ISO 8859-8.
Juliusz
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