James, Eric,
As you will have noticed, the CIDFonts stuff is badly in need of more
detailed documentation. When you puzzle out how to make XFree86
usable with CIDFonts, I'll be very grateful if you can produce a
summary suitable for inclusion in the fonts docs.
I may be wrong, but I believe that the Unicode CMaps cover all the
subset of Unicode that can be implemented using the Adobe-Japan-1
(resp. Adobe-Japan-2) collections. The JIS prefix doesn't mean that
the range is restricted to any particular JIS encoding, but rather
that the mappings are compatible with JIS. (There are many choices
possible for mapping a character encoding such as UCS to a glyph
encoding such as Adobe-Japan-1, and the CMaps are designed so that the
following diagram commutes:
JIS \
| \
| \
| \
V V
UCS --> Adobe-Japan-1
where JIS->UCS is the (now obsolete) Unicode mapping of JIS to UCS.)
Keith has recently convinced me that using Unicode font mappings with
the core protocol is suboptimal; thus, I don't think you should spend
too much time puzzling over the Unicode CMaps.
On the other hand, use of Unicode is definitely recommended with the
new (Render-based) APIs; as CIDFonts are definitely not going away
anytime soon (contary to some of the OpenType propaganda we hear), it
would be good to complete the CID support in Xft and the font matching
library (whatever its name today). As far as I'm aware, most of the
pieces are there already (CIDFont file and CMap file parsing in
FreeType 2), it should hopefully be possible to implement fully
automatic recognition and installation of CIDFonts in a moderate
amount of work.
(While I do find this a fun project, I am not currently at liberty to
volunteer.)
Eric, nice to see you back.
Juliusz
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