Re: FYI pango/font status

[Owen Taylor]

On Mon, 2005-01-03 at 19:28 +0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > > > * How do we deal with kerning in Pango?  AFAIK, Pango does not
> > > >   read AFM/TFM files, so how can it compute kernings?
> > > 
> > > IIRC Owen has mentioned that he plans to support reading of AFM
> > > files for Type 1 fonts to get kerning.  Kerning from OpenType
> > > should be supported already (but I'm not sure).
> > 
> > Do you know the status of these plans?
> 
> Owen, can you answer this, please?  Since there are two mechanisms for
> kerning (the `kern' table and the `kern' feature in the GPOS table) I
> wonder how Pango is handling this.

I won't say that I actually have plans for handling AFM files. I
basically know 
how it would work:

 A) fontconfig needs to be modified to handle locating AFM files
 B) Based on the result, Xft and/or Pango calls FT_Attach_File()

At that point, the rest of the logic (which just uses the FreeType
kerning interfaces) should just work.

A) is the hard part... I'm not sure if they'd look like additional
font files (so show up separately in fc-list) or be addition
pattern elements in FcPattern - FC_AFM_FILE or something like that.
The second is more logical but the first is easier to implement.

It should be discussed on the fontconfig mailing list if someone is
interested in tackling the issue.

Regards,
                                        Owen

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