Hi, and thanks everybody for your replies. On 8/2/06, Jeremias Maerki <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
...No, I've been able to restore kerning support. If there's still some commented code I should probably remove it now. Can you give me a pointer?...
You're right, kerning works for builtin fonts at least. It doesn't seem to work in my tests with user-specified fonts, but I've just done a quick test.
...I wonder if supporting Type 1 outlines would be worth the effort. So far, I've never seen an OpenType font with Type 1 outlines. Have you?...
Seems like most of the standard OpenType fonts on my MacOSX system use Type 1 outlines. But you're right that supporting TrueType outlines would be a good start already.
> 2c) Verify that the character encodings are correct...
...The problem is that FOP does not currently support generating a ToUnicode table. Victor Mote has the fixed in FOray and we have a patch in Bugzilla that uses that code to do the same for FOP. Since nobody has dealt with the legal part of grabbing someone else's code in this case, the patch hasn't been applied, yet. The patch: http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5335
IIUC what's needed here is to contact Adam Strzelecki, author of the patch, and ask him to "Grant license to ASF for inclusion in ASF works (as per the Apache Software License ยง5)"? This is how things are done when patches are uploaded via http://issues.apache.org/jira.
...Finishing 2) would then also mean finishing FOrayFont to the degree that it can be used in FOP. I guess that will need further deliberation...
I've studied FOray and integrating it is probably out of scope for my current work. It doesn't look too hard, but it impacts quite a lot of existing code, so I fear there might be hidden roadbumps in there. OTOH I agree that using it (and maybe re-integrating that code in FOP?) seems to make more sense than doing a lot of work on FOP's current font-handling code. Also, from other's comments in this thread, it seems like handling smart font features (glyph substitutions) might be a lot of work, better done in a (yet hypothetical) second phase once basic OpenType support works well. At this point, my plan, for a first phase, would be -Integrate Adam Strzelecki's patch to support extended character sets cleanly -Check that OpenType fonts with TrueType outlines are usable as custom fonts, including kerning. Fix things as needed, and have a look at what's needed to support Type 1/CFF outlines. -Try to get a few OpenType reference fonts that can be distributed with FOP for testing and demonstration (I'd ask some font editors, the fonts can be crippled if they want, for example by removing portions of the glyph sets). The smart fonts stuff would (maybe) come later, the above might be sufficient for my current project. I'm being much less ambitious than yesterday...but the above looks like a useful concrete step. WDYT? -Bertrand
