Re: font substitution

[Fred Kiefer]

Yen-Ju Chen wrote:
> On 8/12/07, Yen-Ju Chen <yjchenx@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 8/12/07, Fred Kiefer <fredkiefer@gmx.de> wrote:
>>> I tried both the AR PL fonts and they seem to work for me. The problem
>>> you reported in the other mail was when creating the character set, not
>>> when checking if a character was included. Perhaps you could send me
>>> your test file. At the moment I am not able to reproduce the problem.
>>>
>>> Excluding some fonts from the check wont be an option as people may want
>>> to use this fonts anyway and then we have the same problem. We really
>>> need to find out, what is going wrong here.
>>>
>>> And GNUstep should be able to support all Unicode characters, if not we
>>> need to change this. From looking at the code I see no limitation.
>>   Here is the text I used. It is in UTF-8 encoding.
>>   You need a Chinese font (AR PL...)
>>   and another font which has better coverage than usual,
>>   probably one of the DejaVu font for a row of symbol in the bottom.
> 
>   I check the fonts again.
>   The one in question is "AR PL ZenKai Uni.nfont".
>   It shows a "Critical Error" of NSCharacterSet panel and
>   and an exception in terminal:
>   " NSImage: compositeToPoint:fromRect:operation: failed due to
>     NSInternalInconsistencyException: Cannot find stored representation"
> 
>   If you want to try, there is an application in Etoile:
>   Etoile/Services/User/Typewriter/
>   (Well, you also need Etoile/Frameworks/OgreKit, which need oniguruma 
> library).
>   You can create a new document, choose "Edit"->"Characters...".
>   It is a panel allowing you to see all of the glyphs from a chosen font.
>   When you choose "ZenKai", the exception raises.
>   Or you can use Etoile/Services/User/FontManager/ (no dependency).
>   It has the same result.
>   I have to say a bad font can be anywhere.
> 

Thank you for all these advices. I was able to reproduce and understand
the flipping of the font. It happens when a font without an explicit set
matrix gets replaced by an explicit matrix. This is rather strange and
most likely wrong. To work around this problem I now use a font manager
method, which in the end does exactly what you suggested. This way has
the benefit that when ever we improve the code in NSFontManager the font
substitution will also improve.

Even with all your help I was not able to reproduce the NSCharacterSet
problem. Is it possible that this only happens with a certain version of
Freetype? I seem to have libfreetype.so.6.3.16 on my SuSE 10.2 system.

Cheers,
Fred