Subject: Re: ttf fonts status
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Sun Feb 18 2001 - 11:34:47 CST
At 08:55 AM 2/17/01 -0000, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>No entirely; the ttf printing only works with Ghostcript at the
>moment; it will not work on a genuine PS printer, because the ttf
>fonts do not get embeded into the PS output. To do that we need
>to generate PS Type 42 font from the ttf font, we then embed the
>Type 42 font. I am looking into it, there should be some programme
>around that does the conversion (Type 42 is just kind of a PS
>wrapper around the raw ttf font).
Gotcha. Sounds like you're getting very close, though. :-)
>That should be possible, but we would have to run mkfontdir and
>some support programmes every time we launch AW; I am bit
>reluctant to go in this direction, because it means doing things
>behind people's back and potentially undoing any changes that
>they did by hand.
Oh, right. I forgot about that. Doh!
>I think it would be better to have something like
>Tools->Install New Font on the AW menu.
Hmm. So how would this work? Off the cuff, I can envision two
alternatives:
1. Short & sweet. Just pull up a file dialog, select a valid font file,
and add it. This probably introduces a platform-specific menu item, but I
can see the argument for doing so.
2. More complex. Pop up a dialog showing all installed fonts (by name),
and allow folks to add/remove specific ones. This could be a standalone
dialog, but we might be better off folding this add/remove functionality
into the existing Unix font dialog. (Essentially you'd invoke the
functionality from #1 off a new button somewhere in the existing dialog.)
Do folks have a preference between the two UIs? Or perhaps a better idea?
>What I would like to add first though, is the pfa2afm utility to
>generate afm files from pfa fonts in the same manner we do with ttf
>fonts so that installation of both types of fonts would only involve
>adding the actual font file.
Sweet!
I really love the idea that people will be able to easily make any font file
on their system Just Work in AbiWord. This problem has always plagued Unix
word processors, none of whom have ever come up with a sufficiently friendly
solution (AFAIK).
Paul,
GUI fanatic
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sun Feb 18 2001 - 11:37:02 CST