Re: FYI: encoding issues

[Werner LEMBERG]

Some minor clarifications and additions.

>   - dynamics, numbers, modern notes, ancient notes should be merged
>   into an OpenType font.
>
>   [What about the brace font?]

IMHO it should be included too.  We have plenty of space available...

>   - font parameters (staff-space, line thickness, stem attachment
>     points) are stored in the OT font, since  OT fonts support
>     arbitrary tables.

Such a table could be called `lily'.

>    - Printing PS is done by embedding a CFF font.
>      (CFF is a wrapper format for OpenType).

It's rather the other way round.  The SFNT format used for both
TrueType and OpenType fonts can also represent CFF fonts (such fonts
have the extension .otf); they simply contain a table called `CFF '
which is the complete CFF font.  For creating a PS document, just
extract the contents of the `CFF ' table and paste it into the output
file (with some syntactic sugar to make it a valid PS resource).

>   - Input to Pango is a list of glyphs.

Input to Pango is a Unicode encoded string of *input characters*.  As
silly as it may sound, we have to convert the internally stored list
of glyph names back to input characters for that process.

>    - can we write CFF?

Yes, in the `Generate Fonts' menu it is called `Open Type (CFF)'.

>    - can we create spacing tables within an OT font?

Not yet.  I'll send a request to George.  BTW, I suggest to create a
simple ASCII table for the spacing data, compress it with zlib, and
store that data in the `lily' table.

>  * Pango: does Pango work correctly with the PUA map in an OT font?
>   Can we have glyph-list + (X,Y) output (so: can we use Pango without
>   linking X11 in?)

Please ask Owen.

>  * Does pango + freetype work ok on cygwin?

FreeType does, since it has no other dependencies (well, it depends on
zlib, but only if you activate the decompression option).


   Werner