Re: FYI: encoding issues

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

address@hidden writes:
> 
> Some minor clarifications and additions.
> 
> >   - dynamics, numbers, modern notes, ancient notes should be merged
> >   into an OpenType font.
> >
> >   [What about the brace font?]
> 
> IMHO it should be included too.  We have plenty of space available...

Hmmm. We should expand the size of a single brace subfont, otherwise,
we need too many feta-braces-[a-z]-[0-9]*.mf files.

> >    - Printing PS is done by embedding a CFF font.
> >      (CFF is a wrapper format for OpenType).
> 
> It's rather the other way round.  The SFNT format used for both
> TrueType and OpenType fonts can also represent CFF fonts (such fonts
> have the extension .otf); they simply contain a table called `CFF '
> which is the complete CFF font.  For creating a PS document, just
> extract the contents of the `CFF ' table and paste it into the output
> file (with some syntactic sugar to make it a valid PS resource).

Hmm. I tried to google for sfnt, but without avail. Is SFNT just a
"container" format, like XML or RIFF ?

> >   - Input to Pango is a list of glyphs.
> 
> Input to Pango is a Unicode encoded string of *input characters*.  As
> silly as it may sound, we have to convert the internally stored list
> of glyph names back to input characters for that process.

Yes. Urgh.

> >    - can we create spacing tables within an OT font?
> 
> Not yet.  I'll send a request to George.  BTW, I suggest to create a

Cool.

> simple ASCII table for the spacing data, compress it with zlib, and
> store that data in the `lily' table.

Hmmm. We'd have to link zlib, and parse the data. I guess it would be
easier to generate the table as binary directly, and unpack (without
error checking).


-- 

 Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden   |   http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen