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Re: T1 font support in xgps


From: Fred Kiefer
Subject: Re: T1 font support in xgps
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 23:43:43 +0100

I liked the way the anti alias displayed the big italic text (For the
smaller point size, especially in the menus, I think the screen font I
am using is better). But more than that I like the way the icon fits
into its background. Could you donate that icon back to the Ink
application?

> 
> The hard part however, is making the font system fit
> with the rest of GNUstep.  That is:
> - Provide the T1 fonts to the GNUstep system.
> - Map the names of the T1 fonts to names like `Helvetica' and back.
> - Get all the font charactersitcs right.
> - Make it possible to mix AA fonts and non AA fonts.
> - Make it possible to use Xlib fonts and T1 fonts
>  at the same time.
> Etc.

As for your questions:
It shouldn't be to hard to get decent names for the fonts and to find
the font characteristics. Just have a look at the code in GSFontInfo and
its two subclasses. It should be possible to reuse most of the code from
AFMFontInfo. Or even better, we could try to move the Postscript font
parsing and the AFMFontInfo up to the frontend. What is left to do then
is to make those two font implementation work in parallel, and I think
this is the hardest part.
Perhaps we should, instead of hacking this somehow into the frontend,
change the whole way fonts are handled by GNUstep. We could replace the
font_cache, currently used only by the xgps backend, with a more general
font_installer, that would be able to handle different font
implementations. The backend than would have to select those of the
installed fonts that belong to a supported type. 
The next problem is that of the display mechanism, currently text is
shown by the graphics context directly, but to support different fonts
in one backend, the rendering should be handed on to the font info, at
least for the xgps backend.
Those problems have to be solved first, before we can think of
implementing anti aliasing for fonts in GNUstep. Having done this, we
should be open for any font system.





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