[Devel] fixed pitch fonts: should isFixedPitch be honoured?

[Graham . Asher]

FreeType 2 uses the isFixedPitch flag in the PostScript ('post') table in
TrueType fonts to decide whether to replace the advance width of a
character by the maximum advance width of any character in the font. I'm
not sure this is the right thing to do. It gives a very bad appearance to
(among others) the Chinese font MSSONG.TTF.

The TrueType documentation says that the 'post' table contains 'additional
information needed to use TrueType fonts on PostScript printers', which
implies to me that the information is not intended for general use. I note
also that an ad-hoc flag, FT_LOAD_IGNORE_GLOBAL_ADVANCE_WIDTH, was added to
suppress this behaviour, according to the in-source comment because of
badly behaved Dynalab fonts; but I suspect that the behaviour may be wrong
for any font.

I'd be very grateful for comments on this question.

Graham Asher
Symbian Ltd.




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