Re: Is there any documentation at all about gnome-print

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

On Sun, 2 Sep 2001, Valek Filippov wrote:

 Hi,

 Gnome version of AW should just measure width of glyphs using gnome-print,
not by parsing *.afm files (i.e. it won't have to parse fonts.dir, *.afms and
have fonts subdirectory in $prefix/AbiSuite at all) - this way ALL problems
will be fixed (but yes, only in gnome version) - inability to handle ttfs,
inability to use fonts with a lot of glyphs in them and requirement of fonts 
in particular encoding.
 It would be rather trivial 10K hack.
 But gtk version will still be where it is.

> > We could but there seems no point. It would certainly be slower than doing
> > what we're currently doing.
> > Look at the symbol.e2u file distributed in our unxfonts directory. It maps
> > the 8 bit font-specific code to unicode. I imagine something like this
> > could be done for Cryllic and other font sets too.
> Yes. But for Cyrillic you need to create big set of same fonts with different encoding:
> at least koi8-r and win1251 that will be used for russian and bulgarian.
> Also you need to think about 3-language people, for examle from Israel.
> Here one want to use hebrew+english/german+russian.
> >From my (font-designer) point of view it means that I need split full font to 3 parts:
> AdobeStandart for english/german (coz I want not to change latin part of fonts extended by me),
> iso8859-8 for hebrew, koi8-r and/or win1251 for russian.
> So I also need to use different names for same fonts with different charsets
> (like NimbusSans, NimbusSans-Cyr and NimbusSans-Heb).
> For other glyph-name-centric application I can use full font that include all glyphs.
> 
> > However in terms of the complete end-user package, we in Free Software are
> > seriously lacking high quality fonts. It doesn't matter how great the
> > rest of our software is, if we don't have a large variety of high quality
> > fonts people are going to complain.
> > 
> > It appears to be one of the biggest current complaints in making about
> > AbiWord VS Kword. Our fonts, being the free Type 1's look ugly. I believe
> > this is because KDE take full advantage of the truetype fonts stolen off
> > peoples Windows partitions. I don't know for sure. I haven't investigated.
> The only dificult task related to ttf is good hinting.
> Autohinted ttf versions can be easy made from free URW Type1 fonts.
> 
> Valek

 Best regards,
  -Vlad