Subject: Re: unix font handling and printing under utf-8 locale
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Jan 30 2001 - 17:05:11 CST
Hi Vlad,
> I think that XP PS export is not worth the efforts (it's easy achievable
>on
>Windows say by installing fake PS printer, and asking to print to file when
>printing to that printer to get almost reasonable .PS; same should be
>possible on all platforms that can use .PS for anything meaningful).
There is no reason why we can't do XP PS. You don't need a fake PS printer
or anything - PS is just a markup language. All we do is call things like
`drawLine %begin %end %width` and `setFont Times-Roman` and such in our
current PS driver. The only reason, IIRC, that PS export was limited to UNIX
was that instead of calling `setFont fontName` we are (dumbly, IMHO) doing
the following:
Dump-Font-AFM-Into-The-Friggin-Header name:Times-Roman index:1
setFontIndex 1
writeSomeText "Hello World"
> We should provide an option - whether to dump all needed afms/pfms into
>.ps
>file when printing to .ps. Then our .ps files can even be better than
>gnome-print ones.
Ick... I dislike this option. Why would one want to do this? And why,
exactly, would this be preferable/better than gnome-print? The output would
still be bigger and less optimized (Gnome-Print optimizes the hell out of
its generated PS for size and speed). If we support this option, we lose out
even moreso because we still have to ship those fonts, which is what we'd
like to avoid in the first place.
> And also I would like to return back the ability to print to .ps in gnome
>port - it's too severe to force users to use only unstable gnome-print.
The correct solution is to fix gnome-print. And trust me, Chema and Lauris
would love the help right now, esp. from intellegent hackers like yourself.
However, I will not accept patches to revert this behavior. We shouldn't
need calls like explodeFonts() and setCJKFont() and is_cjk_char() in order
to display ourselves to the screen or to PS. This is eating up > 20% of my
abiword-process time, which IMHO is unacceptable.
> Also, it still would be nice to make AW full supporting TTFs (even with
>non-unicode ttf fonts).
This would be great. Maybe we could use freetype for this?
Dom
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