Re: Fonts and readability

["Sergey I. Panov" <sipan mit edu>]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2000 at 11:55:24PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> "Sergey I. Panov" <sipan@mit.edu> writes:
> 
> >  MS freely downloadable TT fonts collection? Is there some licensing
> > problem? They do cover all the common scripts and styles.
> 
>  - They aren't modifiable
>  - They aren't redistributable
>  - Microsoft could pull them from distribution at any time.
> 
> Also, I don't believe that they have CJK fonts as part of their
> collection, but I could be wrong.
> 
> But in any case, you can't build a free system where the essential
> component is a proprietary product from a company competing against
> free software.

 Then we need font editor. Commercial font editors (just two decent
font editor are on the market) are >$300. I read a few articles
about METAFONT script -> TT/T1 transformation. Unfortunatly your need
fonteditor to define hints at the last stage. There are also some
tools available, that let you design METAFONT scripts using xfig. I
guess it is theoretically possible to turn some free vector drawing
program into a font editor (?with METAFONT based automation?). 

>  - Better metrics - this includes lots of stuff - kerning tables,
>    positioning information for diacriticals, baseline adjustment
>    information.
> 
>  - Better ways to deal with subset fonts. It's painful to get the
>    information about what characters are in a subset font
>    out of X currently.
> 
>  - Better font matching capabilities
> 
>  - Ability to deal with alternate glyphs for characters.
> 
>  - Ability to draw rotated glyph strings.

 And you want to have all that without bypassing X (font descr. files
-- .afm and some extra info if needed )?

 Regards,
           Sergey