On Wednesday 21 August 2002 6:36 pm, Owen Taylor wrote:
|  Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
|  > 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 believe I'm completely wrong about it :-)
|
|  I got confused because FreeType handles .FON files, so if you point
|  fontconfig at the fonts directory on your Windows partition, you get lots
|  of bitmap-only fonts that you have to handle. But they aren't TTF files.
|
|  The TrueType font format is certainly extraordinarily grotty. But
|  it is also complete in ways that most other font formats aren't.
|
|  (If we ever want to handle, say, bitmap Arabic fonts, then we really,
|  really want to be doing it using OpenType GSUB tables rather than
|  inventing new custom glyph encodings.)
|
|  And widely standard. As Keith says, we can't *not* support TrueType.

Hi Owen!

I completly support anything you said above.
The only concern (and a major one!) I have about TrueType is *delta hint* and 
Apple patent issues.
TrueType fonts look extremly ugly with Bytecode interpreter disabled.
And AFAIK Mandrake and SuSE ship their versions of Linux with Bytecode 
interpreter *disabled* (in FreeType2)
// don't know about RedHat, but I guess it's the same.

So, you *can* support TrueType (and we *should* support it), but IMO main 
efforts should go to PostScript  Type1 / OpenType with Adobe CFF fonts 
support, as it's possible to enhance rendering quality for those fonts and be 
patent-safe, on the other hand.

|
|  Regards,
|                                          Owebn
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Cheers,
-- 

Vadim Plessky
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