Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 14:33:44 -0400 From: sbabkin@dcn.att.com To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: babkin@bellatlantic.net Subject: anybody from the XFree86 team here ? Message-ID: <C50B6FBA632FD111AF0F0000C0AD71EE018C1D37@dcn71.dcn.att.com>
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Hi! I wonder whether is here anybody from the XFree86 team ? I've tried to contact the former X consortium and the XFree86 group from their websites but got no answer. I still think that the matter is fairly important for X11 i18n, so this is my next try :-) I'm working on conversion of TTF fonts into Type1 format. Actually, all I need is to get some russian scalable fonts :-) Upto now I have found a freeware TTF->T1 converter, fixed a number of bugs in it and added some features to it, wrote a perl script that fixes a number of problems that are typical for available TTF fonts or introduced during conversion (there is still a lot of space for improvement, the next thing I'm working on is autohinting), wrote scripts to convert fonts between different encodings, and created tables for this conversion for all more or less widely used russian encodings (KOI-8R, CP-866, CP-1251, ISO8859/5). Here goes the trouble: The Type1 font library in X11 is INTENTIONALLY BROKEN. It ignores the encoding specification in the font itself and forces all the fonts to use Latin1 encoding. I think, I know the reason: there exist broken font editors (like Fontografer) that specify Adobe Standard encoding but actually use names from the Adobe Latin1 encoding. So, the library parses the encoding table well but then it just throws out the learned encoding table and uses Latin1. And guess what ? Some of the characters used in the russian fonts do not have any names in Adobe Latin1 encoding. Most of them still can be defined using some pathologically dirty trick with reusing the same name for more than one glyph - Fontographer does this, but not the freeware program, and the resulting font works only with the X font library and does not work at all with Ghostscript. This problem can be fixed by a two-line fix that I propose: let's force only Adobe Standard encoded fonts to use Adobe Latin1 encoding and leave alone the fonts with explicitly defined encoding table. Of course, I have fixed my local copy of X sources but it does not enjoy me at all to do that with each next installation. Can it please be fixed in the main X repository ? By the way, I want to submit the results of my work to the free software community and wonder how to do it in the best way: by contributing it to the XFree86 project and/or making a port/package for FreeBSD. I would appreciate also if someone could point me to some russian TTF fonts that are freeware for sure, so that converted versions of them may be included into the distribution. Also, if somebody needs, I have written also the keyboard layouts for XFree86 for all 4 russian encodings. And, finally, pushing my luck :-) : I would like very much to see the characters with codes 0x80-0x9F defined as printable in xterm. Of course, I do that with each copy of xterm I work with, but I would like to see that in the standard distribution. Provided that they were defined to be ignored in X11R6.1 and earlier, that should not hurt anybody. The positive sides of redefinition are: 1. These codes are used for uppercase russian letters in CP866 encoding 2. I hate to `cat' some innocent text and get the xterm completely stuck as it occurs with X11R6.3 where these characters are defined as control characters -Sergey Babkin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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