urg.

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

I've been working on direct PDF output. The basis (objects, byte
offsets) is easy enough, but 

 * Type1 fonts have to embedded binarily.

 * Type1 fonts have to be interpreted to extract glyph widths (with freetype?)

 * The Type1 has to be read, to determine byte offsets of
   different sections

 * There is no glyphshow operator in PDF (damn). I believe that
Unicode is well supported for text, but for emmentaler, we have 
to something with CMaps, CIDs and other stuff I don't understand.

I wonder whether this is a smart choice to try out; direct PDF seems
like more work than I anticipated.



I see a couple of other options:

* Use libgnomeprint.

        byrd:~/usr/src/lilypond$ ldd /usr/lib/libgnomeprint-2-2.so
        libart_lgpl_2.so.2 => /usr/lib/libart_lgpl_2.so.2 (0x009a8000)
        libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so.0 (0x00a19000)
        libpango-1.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0 (0x009e1000)
        libgobject-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgobject-2.0.so.0 (0x00872000)
        libgmodule-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0 (0x0086d000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x005cc000)
        libglib-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0x007f0000)
        libxml2.so.2 => /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2 (0x0034e000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x006bd000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0x005a7000)
        libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x0075e000)
        libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0x006f5000)
        libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x0069b000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x0047b000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00462000)
        libexpat.so.0 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.0 (0x00786000)

this increases dependencies of lily, and I wonder how much control we
will have over the output.

* We can make FontConfig ignore TTF fonts. We don't call the next
release 3.0, but 2.6.

Viable, but not so attractive.

* We can convert every TTF with fontforge to Type42 or CFF and include
that in the PS. For performance reasons, we can cache the result.

Problem: this adds rapidly changing fontforge as a running dependency.
This is not viable, IMO.

* We can hack fontconfig support into Ghostscript 8.15, pray that all
  distros start shipping it and have GS load the fonts.

  A nice solution, but a logistic nightmare? I suspect that this might
  be the easiest route technically, though.


What do you guys think? In particular, Font Guru Werner - should I
persist trying to get direct PDF up and running, or pursue the
alternatives?

-- 

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