Re: [gnome-print] Gnome2 printing, font subsetting and CJK fonts

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris ximian com>]

Hello!

On Thu, 2001-12-20 at 03:24, Richard Shih-Ping Chan wrote:
> Any interest in embedding TTF fonts as type 42 or type 2 CID for
> printers with the TT rasteriser? Any work on embedding CID-Keyed fonts?
> I would like to offer to help if you think it's a "Good Thing" for gnome-print.

It certainly is, if it helps to reduce embedded size and or
improve rasterizing.
We do Type42 for TTF-s with small table sizes (AFAIK it requires
all tables except 'glyf' to fit in PS strings - i.e. 65336 bytes),
but without any subsetting.
If you are interested in helping, then the most current code
is at moment in gnome-print (gnome1 version) CVS, branch
gnome-1-4-branch, in libgnomeprint/gnome-font-face.c
What happens, is simply generation of embeddable PS objects,
a) covering used glyphs (given as bit array)
b) encoded to the encoding identical to freetype glyph numbering
Due to (b) the resulting encoding will contain many 'holes'
for subsetted fonts. If this will be problem, we have to
change PS generation code to generate additional glyph mapping.

> > Technically gnome-print target is larger than PostScript,
> > but for bitmap and screen based formats things are easier
> > to do - just letting freetype to do actual rendering and
> > compose bitmap images into buffer.
> 
> What is the target list? 
> For raster targets like HP PCL I presume you convert all fonts to 
> bitmaps before sending to the printer?

At moment, we are targeting only:
- PS (working, stable) - most important
- PDF (buggy, needs lot of cleaning/rewriting)
- RGB/RGBA rasters (working, need performance tweaks)
- Onscreen preview (works, techincally is similar to raster rendering)

There were experimental raster and vector HP PCL drivers at some
point, but currently we do not plan to put much efforts into
such things. What is more important, is writing reliable font embedding
into PDF.

Best wishes,
Lauris Kaplinski