Re: urg.

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Han-Wen Nienhuys writes:

> I've been working on direct PDF output. The basis (objects, byte
> offsets) is easy enough, but 
>
>  1. Type1 fonts have to embedded binarily.
>
>  2. Type1 fonts have to be interpreted to extract glyph widths (with 
> freetype?)
>
>  3. The Type1 has to be read, to determine byte offsets of
>    different sections
>
>  4. There is no glyphshow operator in PDF (damn). I believe that
> Unicode is well supported for text, but for emmentaler, we have 
> to something with CMaps, CIDs and other stuff I don't understand.
>
> I wonder whether this is a smart choice to try out; direct PDF seems
> like more work than I anticipated.

That sounds as a set-back, but I do not have a clear picture of the
size of the problems.  If we could estimate the amount of work that
each problem should take, it would be easier to choose between PDF
output and fontconfig support for gs.  Choosing the gs route could
mean a problematic support on most platforms, but we could try to
investigate that too (ask Red Hat, Debian, Cygwin, eg.).

It seems that some (1. binary embedding, 4. contstruct
glyph-name->charcode mapping) are technical questions rather than
glyph-name->things that require much work.  As for 2. exact widths,
we already do that for whole strings (only need scm wrapper?); I do
not understand what 3.  means.

Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org