Subject: Type 1 postscript font support questions...
From: Mike Meyer (mwm@mired.org)
Date: Fri Jun 02 2000 - 00:39:43 CDT
I'm not sure if this is going to the correct list, but I am going to
talk about the code, so forgive me if I blew it.
After wading through the user mail list archives, I figured out how to
get AbiWord to recognize my Type 1 fonts. These are .pfb & .afm files
purchased from Adobe as "DOS format disks" (yeah, it's been a while)
that I've been using with ghostscript, Linux Wordperfect, and X (among
other things that read Postscript fonts). This worked fine until I
tried to print. If the keeper of the FAQs is interested, I'd be glad
to write this up as a paragraph for the FAQ.
After working through xap_UnixPSParseAFM.c, I decided that the problem
was the DOS origins of the AFM files. The CR in the files was
confusing the tokenizer. Changing the parsing code to use the isspace
library routine solved that problem - it no longer died trying to
parse the AFM file. That's why this is going to the developer list -
is there some portability reason that isspace wasn't used? If not, I
can create a patch file pretty trivially. If so - well, another patch
is needed.
Three related notes. The initial attempts to print using those fonts
fails. Not all PostScript printers (I've got an HP LJ5MP) can deal
with PFB as is - they need to be converted to PFAs. Has anyone looked
at doing this?
Second note: xap_UnixFontManager::_allocateThisFont sets the font type
to STYLE_NORMAL - and then leaves it that way if it doesn't recognize
the font style. This means that adding oblique fonts (slant of "o")
turns into STYLE_NORMAL. Worse yet - so do bold oblique fonts. It's
pretty obvious where the fix should go, but it's not obvious what the
fix should be (quietly ignore the font? A requester?).
Finally, anyone have any objection to sorting the font list? It would
make larger font lists much easier to deal with.
Thanx,
<mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Fri Jun 02 2000 - 03:27:05 CDT