Re: [Devel] Fonts with glyphs containing zero contours

[Detlef Würkner]

address@hidden (Keith Packard) wrote:

> I've discovered that even common fonts contain glyphs which are not 
> supposed to be blank that have no contours defined for the outlines.
> The venerable 'courier new' font (http://keithp.com/~keithp/fonts/cour.ttf)
> has three glyphs encoded in the unicode map at 0x2591, 0x2592 and 0x2593
> with no contours.  Those are normally the light, medium and dark shade 
> glyphs so it's not surprising they're omitted from the font, what's 
> surprising is that the unicode map includes references to three blank 
> glyphs in their place.  

The glyphs are there. Not as outlines, but as embedded sfnt bitmaps.
Since using embedded bitmaps if possible is default, it is reasonable
that the glyph codes are listed in the unicode map.

> Perhaps, however, the glyph loader is simply broken.  Please find enclosed
> a trivial test program that lists all of the glyphs in the BMP section of
> the Unicode mapping which have no contours.
> 
> If this methodology looks sound, I'm going to include this test as a part 
> of building the unicode coverage map for my font configuration library.  
> Towards that end, can anyone suggest a set of FT_LOAD flags that would
> cause minimal work within the library?  All I need is to load the 
> contours to check their count.

If you want contours only, you must include the FT_LOAD_NO_BITMAP flag.

Ciao, Detlef
-- 
_ // address@hidden
\X/  Detlef Wuerkner, Langgoens/Germany