Re: Re: Re: Implementing OpenType font support, how hard?
On 8/4/06, Bertrand Delacretaz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...I'll discuss the plan with my project's stakeholders and hopefully get the green light to invest time in this... Good news, I got the green light and will be working on these OpenType improvements in the next few weeks. I'll use the dependencies of issue 40464 [1] to document my progress, and of course discuss the details here. -Bertrand [1] http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/showdependencytree.cgi?id=40464
Re: Re: Implementing OpenType font support, how hard?
On 8/3/06, Jeremias Maerki [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...Sorry, I haven't been clear. Adam obviously grabbed a class [1] from Victor's FOray, adapted it to FOP and put a different license header on top. So, it's not that simple. As a first point, we'll need a license grant from Victor for this file or get him to commit it himself to FOP under his ICLA or we use his file and modify it without removing the original license header (I don't like that last option). Not sure how best to deal with this Ok, thanks for the clarification. I'll see if Victor would agree to donate this one class as a temporary solution, until FOP uses FOray. If not I'll write another implementation. Again, thanks everybody for your comments - I'll discuss the plan with my project's stakeholders and hopefully get the green light to invest time in this. -Bertrand
Re: Re: Implementing OpenType font support, how hard?
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
Re: Re: Implementing OpenType font support, how hard?
On 8/3/06, Manuel Mall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thursday 03 August 2006 21:04, Simon Pepping wrote: ... The main problem with all these smart font features is that you cannot implement them in rendering without also implementing them in the linebreaking code ...That comment does not only apply to line breaking, justification, hyphenation, word spacing, are all affected. That is layout needs to know the exact metrics the renderer is going to use. Doesn't kerning cause the same problem as smart font features (like automatic ligatures)? It also causes the total width of a group of character to change when the group is split between two lines. -Bertrand
Re: Re: Implementing OpenType font support, how hard?
On Thu, Aug 03, 2006 at 05:40:36PM +0200, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote: 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? This sounds very useful to me. Regards, Simon -- Simon Pepping home page: http://www.leverkruid.eu
Re: Re: Implementing OpenType font support, how hard?
Hoi Jeremias, I'll reply on the other points tomorrow, but for now: ...AFAIK, OpenType allows different variants of a font in one font file (ex. normal and bold). We've had requests to support those font files. Have you found out during your investigations what would be involved in supporting this and would this be in scope for your work?... AFAIK, several OpenType fonts can be packaged in a single file as TrueType Collections with a .TTC file extension. If that's what you're thinking about, extracting the individual fonts from such a file shouldn't be a problem. -Bertrand
