Re: [Groff] unicode support - where to compose?

[Pedro A. López-Valencia]

On 2/25/06, Larry Kollar wrote:
>
> How much work would it be to hook into whatever system-wide printer
> drivers there may be?

A lot.

> This is something I've been pondering for a
> while, and I don't even have a clue how gtroff figures out glyph
> widths (is there some communication between gtroff & the
> postprocessor?). It would be nice to have access to all the TrueType
> and PostScript fonts installed on the system without having to build
> metric files and so forth.
>
> If I were to poke at this, where would I start?

I've given a lot of thought to this as well, but I'm not the coder
kind ;-) There is already a possible path: fontconfig and freetype2. I
wonder if they could be used as backend for a utility that extracted
all the metrics information for a truetype font and dumped a properly
formed AFM. I know that can be done with freetype1 (as in ttftoafm and
ttftot42) but that library is obsolete...