Subject: Re: Symbols -- Unicode vs font glyphs (was Re: [PATCH] allow printing via PS generation for gnome port)
From: Vlad Harchev (hvv@hippo.ru)
Date: Mon Feb 19 2001 - 13:48:22 CST
On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, Paul Rohr wrote:
> Vlad,
>
> This is an excellent analysis of our current awkwardness w.r.t. representing
> symbol and wingding characters. Thanks for writing it up so clearly.
>
> I agree that a more extensive fix for 0.7.13 is unneeded.
>
> However, my sense is that the Right Thing to do over the long run would be
> to always store the "correct" Unicode codepoints internally, since that's
> how everything else in our file format is encoded. (Among other things,
> this would eventually allow us to expand the Symbols dialog to insert any
> Unicode character, instead of the limited set of font-specific symbols we
> currently support.)
>
> I'd love to hear our iconv and/or RemapGlyph experts comment on how hard
> it'd be to tackle the additional code required to remap glyphs back into
> font-specific indexes when needed. Is there no way to do so efficiently
> enough?
I think that performance is not an issue (we already have remap-glyph that
uses font-independant map). It's up to how much effort and time is required to
implement support for it.
And of course iconv is fully useless here - support for just another format
similar to *.u2g files is needed (or format of u2g files should be extened to
allow marking the file as "special" and providing information on glyph index
if it's special (probably by introducing a third column - an index of the
character); as for marking file as special - I think using negative number of
fonts will be nice way of marking font as special).
I'm not familiar how AW works with fonts on other platforms - I have an
imression that Type1 fonts in 'unixfonts' directory are only for unix, and on
other platforms platform API is used to query all fonts. So we have to develop
platform-specific solutions on where to put these *.u2g files, how to name
them, how to decide which *.u2g belongs to which font, etc then. Too much
hassle just to do the things correctly.. Another option is to hardwire these
tables in the AW's binary and assume that no Symbol fonts exist in the world
(and that fonts are named the same everywhere) - - things will be greatly
simplified then.
> Paul
Best regards,
-Vlad
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