Hi all,

   One of the items on my list is to look at integrating fontconfig
into Ghostscript. In particular, it would be nice to have Ghostscript
pick up fonts automatically that have been installed using fontconfig.

   Right now, I'm basically trying to figure out what's involved. I
have Keith's Guadec paper, and I saw some mail on the mailing list.
The Guadec paper is a little too vague and high-level for me. I was
not able to find the fontconfig manual, even though the paper promises
that it's available.

   Here are the open questions for me:

1. Is it better for Ghostscript to link to the fontconfig library, or
   to parse the fontconfig files itself?

2. I'm confused about whether fontconfig actually needs to open all
   the accessible fonts using FreeType. If so, there's a performance
   problem.

3. It's pretty clear that fontconfig provides most of the functionality
   of Ghostscript's Fontmap. However, we're extending this functionality
   considerably. Is fontconfig powerful enough?

For more details on the latter, please see CJK.htm of the GS_7_0X branch
of Ghostscript:

http://cvs.ghostscript.com/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/gs/doc/Attic/CJK.htm?rev=1.1.4.5&only_with_tag=GS_7_0X&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

Or download a 7.05 release candidate from
http://casper.ghostscript.com/~giles/ and look at doc/CJK.htm

There is also work in the HEAD branch that is designed to support
substitution - particularly the use of TrueType fonts in contexts
where the document calls for a Type1. I don't have a good reference
for this. Igor Melichev is our primary developer. For those who are
interested, querying on the gs-devel mailing list is probably the
best idea.

Also, I'd like to add my voice against XML for the fontconfig file
format. I used XML in gnome-font, and feel it didn't help in any
significant way. We are reluctant to add an XML parser to the library
dependencies for Ghostscript. A simple text format would be preferred.

I'd like to harmonize with fontconfig, but I'm not yet convinced
that it's a technically sound decision.

Thanks,

Raph
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