Re: Fonts

Darren Benham (gecko@benham.net)
Fri, 26 Mar 1999 11:43:02 -0800


On Fri, Mar 26, 1999 at 01:20:58PM -0600, Shaw Terwilliger wrote:
> > Abiword is using *.pfa files.. Ghostscript (atleast with Debian) comes with
> > *.pfb files...
>
> Oh, PFAs are ASCII formatted, PFBs are binary. You can use the
> free Type 1 utilities to convert between them. The reason that
> the files are PFA in our archive was that they were easier to
> debug when inserted into PostScript output. PostScript should
> handle the binary versions correctly, they're just harder to
> read that way.
Ok, so the *.pf* files are included directly into the post script output,
not processed in any other way by AbiWord? Good! :) That makes my next
move easier.

> > What's the difference and all that? It'd be nice to be able to just use
> > one font package instead of installing, essentially, the same fonts twice.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by this. We install fonts that happen
> to come from GhostScript. We haven't actually modified any
> of these fonts (except for the binary->ascii conversion),
> but AbiWord and X need the fonts.dir to be use the fonts. If
> you're hinting that you'd rather just use the fonts.dir around
> the normal GhostScript fonts, well, you should be able to do
> that. :) The GhostScript fonts were chosen because, well,
> they were the first batch of freely re-distributable Type 1
> fonts I found. We're planning on adding/changing the standard
> font package, and even adding fonts for other character sets
> by the 1.0 release (some for Latin-2, Latin-3, perhaps some
> for Eastern encodings).
The next CD of Debian (2.2 codename potato) is slated to have a package
with ghostscript fonts and a seperate package with the fonts in the abiword
package. If one of those packages could be removed, that would reduce the
necessary disk space....

-- 
Please cc all mailing list replies to me, also.
=========================================================================
* http://benham.net/index.html        <gecko@benham.net>           <><  *
* -------------------- * -----------------------------------------------*
* Debian Developer, Debian Project Secretary, Debian Webmaster          *
* <gecko@debian.org> <secretary@debian.org> <webmaster@debian.org>      *
* <lintian-maint@debian.org>                                            *
=========================================================================


This archive was generated by hypermail 1.03b2.