Owen Taylor wrote on 2002-08-20 14:50 UTC: > > I'm afraid that a vast majority of programs and OS currently using TTF > > simple expect them to always have scalable glyphs; what will happen > > if one of such programs tries to use a bitmap only font for displaying > > at a size for xhich there are no bitmaps embedded ? > > I'm pretty sure Microsoft ships a number of .ttf files with only bitmaps and > no outlines with Windows...
Can you name a few examples to substantiate that claim? I spent an hour yesterday reading the OpenType spec on http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/opentype/ in order to decide whether I should write a BDF to OpenType converter and add it to the ucs-fonts package, to get away from PCF. I'm still undecided for two reasons: - TrueType and OpenType very clearly were designed and intended as outline fonts, and the ability to add bitmaps was meant as an optional add-on for those situations where hinting does not lead to acceptable results. - Both the OpenType file format and its documentation are ugly and ambiguous bejond belief. I had to concentrate not to vomit over my keyboard when I realized for example that the header redundantly encodes all the values - n - floor(log2(n))*16 - 2**floor(log2(n)) - (n-floor(log2(n)))*16 where n is the number of tables. Lot's of unnecessary redundant information that originates in and invites a naive beginner's C programming style that typically leads to buffer overflows and similar implementation vulnerabilities. There are many other odd points in the "specification" of this file format, and all this is not well suited to create trust in the competence and experience of its authors. How alone am I with my scepticism of TTF here, especially with the idea of streching its intended application field to pure pixel fonts? Is this really one of the nice commercial file formats that we want to embrace fully in the open-source world? I feel tempted to start writing up a proposal for a proper compact bitmap file format instead ... Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
