2009/7/23 Craig Ringer <[email protected]>: > On Thu, 2009-07-23 at 02:02 +0200, Martin Schröder wrote: >> If you intend to use a lot of of fonts (or want to include pdfs with >> fonts), you should look at pdftex/luatex. We've spent years on getting >> subsetting etc. right, especially with included pdfs. > > PdfTex is full GPL, isn't it? Pity (as far as I'm concerned) since that > means we can't re-use or library-ify any of the font parsing and > subsetting code unless that code is explicitly re-licensed to dual > GPL/LGPL by its author(s) :S
The GPL comes from XPDF. If that would be gone (and replaced with some LPGL/BSD thing), one could rethink the licensing of a librarified luaTeX. But that's not in the forseeable future. > I'm increasingly irritated by the lack of a good standalone open source > library for font subsetting and parsing. Freetype is designed to make it > hard to get at the guts of it for this sort of use, and it's not really > built to handle subsetting and such anyway. I'd really like to move > toward a shared library for font subsetting for cairo, pdftex, Scribus, > PoDoFo, etc, but feel somewhat hobbled by the full-GPL-only nature of > most of the existing subsetting implementations. Agreed - that would be nice. Although luaTeX would loose it's lead. :-) >> PS: I'm not dissing PoDoFo - these are simply areas where other >> applications already deliver what's needed. > > I think people need to be less defensive about their software ;-) > > There are _often_ cases where others' is a better fit for somebody's > needs than one's own. For example, PoDoFo's design makes it good for > low-level PDF inspection and editing and for the creation of PDFs with > complex or custom constructs that higher level tools may not understand > or support. On the other hand, both in design and in current > implementation state it's not ideal for simple generation of new PDF > documents, it's a terrible choice for high level typesetting and layout, > and it's not great at working with fonts. Amen. podofobrowser is a godsend. :-) > I'll recommend Cairo over PoDoFo for a bunch of uses. I don't have much > experience with pdftex, but even so it'd be one of the first things > that'd come to mind for document processing needs (gee, surprising > that). > > I didn't even know about luatex - but it seems like a pretty good idea. > Lua is a good choice of language, too. I've had enough experience > working with one common/popular embedding language, Python, to know how > shocking it is when you want to embed it. My dream is a luatex with a good pdf library that can be used as a pdf (dis)assembler from lua. Best Martin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Podofo-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/podofo-users
