Type 42

[Sivan Toledo]

Hi,

I am going to supervise a group of students who will do a project
whose aim is to produce postscript font files to include in print
jobs. (That is, the printer driver will ask this piece of software
to generate font files for the fonts in a document, to be included
in the postscript output file; most likely this will be used
in a printer driver for Qt/KDE). Ideally these fonts would be 
only the subset of the glyphs needed for a particular document.

There are 3 or 4 ways to produce the font files for downloading:
1) produce bit maps; we can use FreeType with the existing API
2) produce unhinted outlines (either at device resolution or device
independent); same here.
3) produce a Type42 font file, which is a postcript wrapper
   for a truetype font. No support in TrueType

Which method you want use depends on the printer (support for 42?)
on how many sized you use, and on further processing (distill to pdf).

We can write a Type42 converter (more likely hack an existing one
to subset fonts), but a lot of the TTF parsing machinery would
be the same as in FreeType (finding table and glyph locations and
sizes, for example).  Same goes for a Type1 ascii encoder and subsetter.

Do you think that it would be better to write something that
uses FreeType where possible but is separate, or to integrate this
feature more tightly with FreeType?

Sivan Toledo