Re: [ft] Fontlab, Hinting, Ubuntu and Freetype

[James Cloos]

>>>>> "Pon" == Pon <address@hidden> writes:

Pon> then to check how it renders I need to generate the font, copy it
Pon> over to the Ubuntu VM, install into the system font folder and
Pon> then open Firefox where I have some font testing HTML.

This can be simplified quite a bit.  First, use ~/.fonts rather than a
"system font folder".  Fontconfig (the library which apps like firefox
use to find the fonts) will look in ~/.fonts for the user's fonts.

Since your font will be the only one there, « fc-cache ~/.fonts » will
run quickly.  And even if you don't run fc-cache yourself, fontconfig
will do the equivalent for you anyway.  Either way, it is always faster
to use a dedicated directory when testing revisions to a font.

Pon> To complicate it even more it seems that sometimes I need to
Pon> reboot the virtual machine in order for Ubuntu to recognize the
Pon> change in font

That should not be necessary.  Fontconfig scans the directories every
so many seconds (look for the <rescan/> block in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf
to find how often; mine -- I believe the default -- is set to rescan
every 30 seconds).  You could change that to something smaller to see
whether that helps your workflow.

That said, firefox may be doing something which interferes with
fontconfig's rescanning.  You may still need to restart it.  The VM,
however, should never require a restart.

You can also mount your XP filesystem w/in the VM and either make
~/.fonts a symlink to the NTFS directory where you generate the fonts
or create a ~/.fonts.conf file looking something like:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<fontconfig>
 <dir>/path/to/generated/folder</dir>
</fontconfig>

where the contents of <dir/> should be the path in the VM to the
directory on the host's fs where you generate the fonts.  (I presume
that whichever VM software you are using supports mounting the host's
fs w/in the VM.)

Pon> whether there is some sort of Linux-compatible Freetype
Pon> application that will just load a font on-the-fly (without
Pon> needing to install it to the system font directory) and then let
Pon> me display some sample text and maybe test out hinting versus no
Pon> hinting, antialiasing versus no antialiasing, etc.

In addition to using a font-specific directory (~/.fonts is the
easiest) and/or pointing directly to where fontlab writes the fonts,
you can also try out utilities such as ftview, ftshow, ftgrid and
ftdiff (recently added, might not be in ubuntu yet) from the ft2demos
package.

-JimC
-- 
James Cloos <address@hidden>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6