Re: RFP: XP font mapping mechanism

From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Oct 03 2002 - 23:31:30 EDT

  • Next message: Andrew Dunbar: "Re: RFP: XP font mapping mechanism"

     --- Leonard Rosenthol <leonardr@lazerware.com> wrote:
    > At 7:18 AM +0100 10/3/02, Andrew Dunbar wrote:
    > >Windows doesn't
    > >seem to have such a concept though with i18n fonts,
    > >Uniscribe does actually do some similar tricks. I
    > >have no idea what OS X does.
    >
    > There is certainly nothing in the low level
    > font management and text rendering code on either
    > Windows or Mac OS X that does this type of thing -
    > by the time you get to rendering glyphs on the
    > screen, it's just grabbing stuff from a font.

    An example on Windows is that for Devanagari, it is a
    hard-coded exception which always gives you a
    transformed version of the "Mangal" font when you ask
    for some font which doesn't support Devanagari. It
    will twiddle the horizontal and vertical scale to try
    to match the requested font. This was at least the
    case for Windows 2000.

    > However, as you note, higher level text layout
    > facilities (Uniscribe & ATSUI, respectively) include
    > the ability to take Unicode data in conjunction with
    > a font and if specific glyphs are missing, then fall
    > back to alternatives that might include it, all the
    > way back to a "last resort" font.

    Last time I looked into ATSUI it seemed peope were
    having trouble controlling the fallback. I think it
    was always falling back in cases where the programmer
    wanted more control instead of getting a drastically
    different-looking character. I believe this was in
    Mozilla about 1 year ago so things may have improved.

    > Adobe applications also have a similar concept
    > that their text engine uses, but which also includes
    > the ability to do "font metric matching" and
    > Multiple Master font "fauxing".
    >
    >
    > >Panose information in fonts may also play a part?
    >
    > There is a HUGE amount of debate in the
    > font/text community about the idea of "font
    > matching" - which is one reason such things
    > are being left out of standards like SVG and
    > PDF/X-2.

    It looks like the long-term answer is an open, growing
    font-matching library which can improve over time and
    which every app that wants the same behaviour as
    other apps should use. That sounds like fontconfig to
    me though versions of it would have to appear on the
    other platforms for true uniformity. I don't know how
    hard that would be.

    Andrew Dunbar.

    > LDR
    > --
    >
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    > Leonard Rosenthol
    > <mailto:leonardr@lazerware.com>
    >
    <http://www.lazerware.com>

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