MK> How alone am I with my scepticism of TTF here, especially with the idea
MK> of streching its intended application field to pure pixel fonts?
Markus,
As you may imagine, I did spend quite a bit of time thinking about
this issue before setting out to write fonttootf. I am now convinced
that encoding bitmap fonts in an snft wrapper is a good idea.
The snft font format is, as you justly note, incredibly baroque.
Implementing anything related snft requires reading three
specifications in parallel, working out which features are obsolete,
which are deprecated, and which are supported on your own. A lot of
data are encoded multiple times (for example, in head for Apple
platforms, in OS/2 for Microsoft platforms, in post, in PCLT). (My
favourite example is the handling of the (3,0) Microsoft Symbol cmap
-- have a look at ftenc.c and cry.)
On the other hand, the snft format is reasonably well understood by
now; the number of snft experts I can reach with a single well-
directed e-mail compensates for a lot.
Additionally, some parts of the format are very carefully designed.
The format is intrinsically seekable, which saves quite a bit of
memory for large fonts -- important now that, thanks to your work,
most of our fonts contain thousands of glyphs. It is also extensible,
and there are reasonably well-defined ways of encoding anti-aliased
bitmaps as well as complex script information in the format (OpenType
Layout -- another morass of complexity, though).
Finally, my experiments show that the sfnt format, based on years of
Apple's experience with 128 KB machines, does allow encoding of
bitmaps in a particularly compact manner; your 8x13 is smaller in sfnt
than in gzipped PCF!
I do fully intend to push the experiment further, and adapt both
mkfontscale and the FreeType backend to use this sort of fonts. I do
not feel the need to push the format, as I have no doubt that once the
format is fully supported, our users will naturally move towards using
sbit-only TTFs for its bitmap fonts.
Regards,
Juliusz
_______________________________________________
Fonts mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
