On 14.11.2006 11:28:10 Vincent Hennebert wrote:
> Jeremias Maerki a écrit :
> > Another of my travel projects checked in: I wanted to know how easy it
> > is to load fonts without the XML metrics file. As you can see from the
> > amount of code, it was rather easy. Makes me wonder why we didn't do it
> > earlier. :-)
>
> Nice work, Jeremias. Well, definitely an additional point for "FOPFont".
>
>
> > Please note that the existing functionality is still fully there. The
> > only change is that you can simply now omit the metrics-url attribute in
> > the font configuration and the font will still load. What you lose in
> > this case is the ability to manually tweak the XML metrics file or to
> > specify WinAnsi encoding for TrueType fonts. Furthermore, you currently
> > don't have control over TrueType Collections. The WinAnsi feature should
> > not be necessary anymore now that we have ToUnicode CMaps. The
> > Collection feature is easily added again through an additional attribute
> > in the font configuration.
>
> ... and I don't see why one would need to tweak the metrics of a font?
Fonts like ZapfDingbats or Symbol don't work out of the box. There are a
lot of fonts out there which use strange values in their PFMs. Without
the ability to parse AFMs we will always have a restricted support for
Type 1 fonts.
>
> > I'd be grateful if anyone could test what happens if you load a Type 1
> > fonts on a Unix where the PFM file has an uppercase extension, e.g.
> > "FUTURA.PFM". I have to construct the URI to the PFM manually from the
> > PFB and use a lowercase extension (".pfm"). Maybe we have to improve
> > that to check with upper- and lowercase to account for case sensitive
> > file systems.
>
> This fails. IMO the safest solution is to require that the name of the
> pfm file is specified in the config file.
Thanks for the feedback. Just as I suspected. I agree with your view.
> All the more so it should also
> be possible to give an afm file instead of a pfm one (BTW, Fop can't
> read afm files, can it? Because FOrayFont can...).
/me is looking jealously over to ForayFont for its PostScript
interpreter and AFM parser which uses that.
> If this is ok for you I'll implement these changes. Oh, or perhaps wait
> that a final decision about FOrayFont is made.
>
> Vincent
Jeremias Maerki
