Juliusz Chroboczek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> OT> For Type1 outlines, I'd say that OpenType is the best format long
> OT> term. I don't think we handle it all that well yet, but for
> OT> "interesting" scripts PFA/AFM really isn't an option.
>
> I don't quite agree. Plain Type 1 fonts (PFAs) can obey any *glyph*
> encoding, and are not restricted to using well-known character
> encodings. Character to glyph resolution happens before this, and if
> you control the whole rendering system, there is nothing wrong with
> using PFA.
Well, leaving aside the questions of accent positioning, baseline
adjustment, attachments, and so forth, and saying that it is _only_
a question of glyph set, having a commonly agreed upon glyph set is:
A) A pain
B) a big problem of getting lots of people to agree
C) Sometimes almost impossible. There may not be a well-agreed upon
set of ligatures and glyph variants.
Sure, if you design the font, you write the software to render it,
and you never want to distribute them separately, it probably works.
I don't think this is a terribly common situation.
And when one has to try and deal with a dozen fonts in a dozen different
glyph encodings (see something like the core X arabic module for Pango)
a way of representing the character to glyph mapping in a flexible
way starts seeming pretty attractive.
> I would tend to agree with you in the particular case of
> general-purpose fonts, although I still dislike the complexity and
> lack of structure of OpenType -- perhaps merely a sign of my lack of
> understanding, though.
It's complex certainly. It seems to work OK for a pretty big range
of problems, however. I'm not sure what you mean by a lack of structure ...
isn't all complexity in the structure? It is annoying that for
most of the features there are many ways to encode the same thing ...
presumably in an attempt to provie space efficient encodings. But support
all these formats is really code that only has to be written once.
Regards,
Owen
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