On 03 Mar 2011, at 22:07, Alex Zepeda wrote: Hi Alex
> Over the years I've kept an eye on the lists. Every year it seems like > someone's interested, and someone's willing. Right now I guess I don't know > if anyone is actively working on /proper/ CFF support. So hopefully I'm not > stepping on anyone's toes. Hmm, stepping on toes would imply that you are bothering someone. I would be surprised if that were the case here. :-) The question popped up again recently, but I am unaware of anyone having taken specific actions in that direction since then --apart from you, that is. > I've attached a patch with a quick, dirty, and naive hack. For OTF/CFF > fonts, it embeds the CFF table wholesale in the PDF as a FontFile3 with the > proper Subset fields. This gets you WinAnsi characters only. Pretty sure > there's no kerning in there either. But it's a start. I guess I'll be > looking into what it'll take to get a proper encoding map all setup. Indeed, a good start. The *real* fun would begin, however, if the layout engine could take advantage of the additional functionality offered by CFF as well. Out of pure curiosity, I dove into the related specs recently, and noticed that CFF was meant (mainly) to address two shortcomings of Type 1 fonts: - as the name implies, it is meant to be more 'Compact' - it is meant to satisfy requirements of more complex scripts: where Type 1 only has kerning, CFF has another set of functions at its disposal to define and describe more complex interactions between glyphs (not limited to two). It is centered all around Type 2 charstrings. If I judge correctly, taking full advantage of CFF would mean that, instead of just asking the font what the width is of a single given char, we would pass it a sequence of chars and rely on the font code to figure out the impact of merging/ligatures etc. > My ultimate desire with FOP is to see access alternate glyphs. I'm using > FF's Zwo (yeah, yeah, next time just buy the TrueType version — but even > Quark /kinda/ works with these things) and would like to access the salt > and/or ss01 glyphs. Thanks for sharing the ideas! Regards, Andreas ---
