Jeremias Maerki wrote: > Ok, but this assumes that you work in concert with AWT's font > subsystem. > If we talk about the font subsystem for PDF and PS we have > all liberties we want. If we can give the FO processor a > directory and it makes all the fonts in this directory > available for FO processing then I am where I would like to > be. Of course, there will be some additional topic such as
This is very doable (although I would not have thought to call it auto-registration). Foray does not rely on anything in the font configuration to tell it what kind of font file it is working on -- in other words, it parses enough of each file already to create instances of the correct font subclass. It would not be hard to write a method that opens a directory and creates font instances for each file in that directory. Except ... > font substitution and embedding control, but if we can make ... and even font naming. One of the things that the configuration file does is provide (at least potentially) an unambiguous and cross-platform way of declaring the relationships between fonts in various families and the mapping between what they are called in an FO document and how they are found in the system. > the font registration a no-brainer for at least 60% of the > people we've accomplished a lot. The Java2D/AWT renderer is a > different story. There we have to work with what we are > given. I really wonder if Peter will really stay with the > 100% AWT approach till the end. Most people will want to point the auto-registration to C:\WINDOWS\FONTS. Mine has 581 files in it, each of which would have to be opened and partially parsed. I actually use no more than 10-15 for FO work. I think this might actually open up a bunch of potentially ugly support issues, and I would think twice about it. Nevertheless, it can be done. As far as Peter's ideas in this area, I want to spend more time on them. There is a great divide in FOrayFont between what we call FreeStandingFont (those read from disk) and SystemFont (the AWT fonts). Ideally it would be nice for those to be merged. Since an AWT font can be created from a font on disk, if those metrics are suitable for layout, then the disk font can be used for embedding (this can't be done with AWT fonts returned by the java runtime, because it doesn't tell you where the physical file is or what are its contents). That whole idea deserves more thought and experimentation, and I haven't had time to work on the font system since October. Victor Mote
