RE: [Devel] Re: Distiller produced PFA problems

[Blinn, Eric W]

Tom Kacvinsky wrote:
>
> Attached is patch that handles the Subrs problem and the FontMatrix
> problem.  Let me know if it works for you, or if you see any problems
> with it...

Hi Tom.  I tried the patch and it does get around the missing subrs problem.
Of course it should come as no surprise that T1_Open_Face() proceeds to
error out anyway because of the missing charstrings array.  So unfortunately
the missing FontInfo dictionary still results in FT_New_Face() eventually
returning FT_Err_Invalid_File_Format.


> The question is this: if there is no FontInfo dictionary in the font, 
> should we add default values?  What should these defaults be?  If we 
> don't add defaults, perhaps we ought to make the return value alongs 
> the lines of FT_Error_Missing_FontInfo and leave it up to the user of 
> FreeType to supply what they think are reasonable values...

Before integrating FreeType into our application, we were using Ghostscript
to rasterize fonts.  Ghostscript rasterizes the Distiller produced PFA's
okay, and everything looks alright (at least on the surface).  I took a peek
at some of the Ghostscript code and documentation.  It looks like they are
well aware that some Type 1 fonts don't have a FontInfo dictionary.  I can
see where they have defined a dummy FontInfo, and they may also be
defaulting some missing data. Something similar in FreeType would be great,
but at the very least returning an error code along the lines of
FT_Error_Missing_FontInfo would allow me to try to fill in some blanks and
make use of what is there.

My two cents,
Eric Blinn