Around 14 o'clock on Jun 20, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> I beg to differ. PCF encodes undefined ranges as linear vectors of > (CARD32)0, and uncompressed PCF Unicode fonts are *huge*. Check. This then also suggests that we leave the national encoding as the "normal" encoding and use a compressed representation for other encodings, we could have our cake and eat it too. > KP> a) Add transcoding support to Xft/fontconfig/FreeType. Probably > KP> the best place is inside fontconfig which already has transcoding > KP> support for apple-roman and adobe-symbol encodings found in > KP> TrueType fonts. > > Recent versions of fontenc (since 4.2.0) support transcoding in both > directions. Here's the recipe. I would prefer not to embed fontenc inside fontconfig; the two libraries have very different configuration models. Fontconfig dynamically discovers fonts and permits run-time updates to the configuration while fontenc uses the old static configuration model from the core system, fixing fontenc would be a bunch of work. > I definitely prefer storing all fonts in Unicode. As do I, except for the size of the mapping table needed to use PCF format fonts. > KP> I believe placing multiple encoding vectors in the file would be > KP> more efficient when loading fonts; > > Are you speaking of execution time? Where do you expect it to go? Locating and loading a transcoding table, but I guess that's not a significant problem. > An issue which you're not considering is that the PCF font file format > is really not a particularly nice thing. Have you considered > implementing support for a bitmap font format that is (1) standardised > and (2) supports multibit glyphs? I agree, and if there were an existing format that could hold all of the information from PCF fonts, it might be reasonable to switch to it. I guess I'd rather make a modest extension to PCF instead of a large investement in a new bitmap format. One possible solution is to use BDF, there hacks in FreeType that support deep glyphs, and it's encoding vector is not a simple linear array. It isn't very easy to seek around in it though. > I would suggest sbits with an sfnt wrapper, i.e. OpenType files with > no outlines, embedded bitmaps only. Other suggestions are welcome. Can I get that to hold all of the X properties from a PCF file? Could we use FreeType to load them? Hmm. This sounds easier than I'd feared -- we'd just use FreeType for all font loading inside the core server. We would need a PCF->TTF conversion program. (and BDF->TTF as well, but that's the same thing). Hmm. Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team HP Cambridge Research Lab _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
