Re: Whither the switch to OpenType fonts? (they break my printer)

[John Hawkinson]

(Quoting Han-Wen)
> yeah, I meant to quote the bit about buggy HP PS drivers

Ah.

I'm not sure what to do from here then. You said before:

> Of course, if we can make our PS more conforming, I'm all for it, but I'm
> opposed to  (re)installing hacks for being compatible with broken hardware.

While I agree in principle, it seems like we should go to some effort
to produce postscript that works in most places. ("Be liberal in what
you accept and conservative in what you send.") There have been recent
complaints that LilyPond's postscript breaks various other
applications as well, and I suspect that this is the reason.

It is generally the case that some significant set of environments
seem to have trouble with binary-laden PostScript, though I think
this is not the problem here (because of wrapping it in a hex
filter fails).

I have to wonder, then if there is not some subtle bug in fontforge's
Type42 encoding that is making these HP printers die. I don't claim
that HP has a rock solid PS implementation, but most of the time it is
pretty decent.

> The problem is that FontConfig will see different versions of the same font,
> and it can get confused and pick the wrong font. Also, the whole machinery
> for creating the PFAFoo fonts, detecting when to substitute them and finding
> them on disk is ugly and rather fragile. We've had  a lot of bugs relating
> to it.

OK. This part really isn't a big deal, of course... Just an issue for
the humans reading the PS code and editing by hand (why would anyone
do that? :)).

> We're using an OTF font iso. a Type1 font because we have to store
> various extra parameters inside the font. OTF/TTF has a neat mechanism for
> that, which Type1 lacks.

I'm a bit confused, then. How is is it that you don't lose functionality
by using the OTF font?

It seems like the Type1 font is always going to be more portable.


My preference would be to restore the use of Type1, if only as an option.

--jhawk