Re: How to use Japanese True Type fonts?

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> writes:

>     Mike> http://www.linux.or.jp/~ishikawa/linux/dists/FreeType/xtt-fonts_0.19990222-3.tar.gz
> 
>     Mike> Until now I tried to use these fonts with XFree86-4.0
>     Mike> (should have support for True Type fonts already build in)
>     Mike> and with the font server 'xfstt' but without any success.
> 
> Yup.  Those are fonts intended for use with the XTT fork of XFree86.

I also tried the MSGOTHIC.TTC and MSMINCHO.TTC fonts which come with
Windows 98-J, but didn't succeed either (could get only the first 256
characters to display).

> You might try mv'ing the fonts.* files out of the way and rewriting
> them to xfstt's satisfaction (by hand, I doubt whether ttmkfdir is
> capable of dealing with Japanese fonts).

Apparently ttmkfdir has problems with Japanese fonts. mkttfdir[1]
seems to do a better job and seems to be intended to be used with
X-TT.

One Problem I encountered with ttmkfdir is that it ignores Microsofts
*.ttc files. After renaming the *.ttc files to *.ttf ttmkfdir
recognizes them, but generates a fonts.dir without entries for
multibyte fonts.

I also tried rewriting the fonts.* files by hand, but that didn't help
either. Of course I might have done it wrong.

> They very likely use features of xfs-xtt which were either not
> merged into xfstt or are still unstable (if there have been recent
> successes on this front).

I think xfstt is completely unrelated to X-TT and XFree86 as well, so
probably nothing will get merged into xfstt.

> Uh-oh....
> 
> I noticed that you have 4 pairs of duplicate font names in the
> fonts.dir output.  Is this correct?

That is another problem caused by ttmkfdir.

>     Mike> Then I tried to use xfstt.

[...]

> Are you sure the fontserver comes earlier in the fontpath?

Yes.

> Does the 4.0 version still have --encoding?

It seems that there is no option like '-encoding' in the X-server
of XFree86-4.0 (there wasn't such an option in XFree86-3.x either).

xfstt (Version 1.1) does have an option --encoding. I already played
with this option:

    mfabian@example.com:~/suse-packages/kon2$ xfstt --encoding jisx0208.1983
    Illegal encoding!
    Valid encodings are:
            iso8859-15
            [...]

The list of valid encodings doesn't contain any encodings for Asian
languages. But the xfstt FAQ states:

xfstt FAQ>	By default xfstt uses the unicode encoding

therefore it might be possible to use a unicode ttf-font for Asian
languages.

> export jisx0208.1983 if it still does.  What is the UNSTRAPLIMIT
> (compile-time variable) for 4.0?

UNSTRAPLIMIT (compile-time variable of xfstt) is 10500U.
I'll try to increase that to 65535U, but I heard that this will cause
X to crash as soon as a big Unicode font is loaded, because:

xfstt FAQ>    "Some popular X11 servers cannot handle split up replies yet,
xfstt FAQ>    but they request data for all characters they are told about.
xfstt FAQ>    A reply of 24bytes * 64k chars exceeds their reply size limit
xfstt FAQ>    by far and this causes trouble."

To test this I must first find a ttf Unicode font containing Japanese ...

>     Mike> According to the installation manual of X-TT it is
>     Mike> distributed in form of patches against XFree86 3.3.5, so
>     Mike> maybe this doesn't work with XFree86-4.0 at all?
> 
> Build the font server separately.

OK, I'll try that.

> (The TT fonts packages consistently broke my XF86Config, and XF86
> upgrades consistently broke on existing TT fonts.  So I gave up....)
> 
> Rumor had it XTT was in disarray from the attempt to merge with
> XFree86 (which failed).  Just a rumor, though.

Yes, it appears to be a mess currently. 

> Those Watanabe fonts are available from the Ghostscript FTP site
> (ftp.cs.wisc.edu, and maybe SourceForge as well) in source form with
> utilities to translate them to BDF and Type 1 (actually Type 0)
> formats (and several others).  I occasionally use them in Type 1
> format, which works fine (but they're kinda klunky at < 30pt; I prefer
> the bitmap fonts).

Are they more klunky as Type 1 fonts than they would be as True Type
fonts? Does the result after rendering differ?

Footnotes: 
[1]  see http://www.io.com/~kazushi/xtt/
         http://www.io.com/~kazushi/xtt/#perlftlib

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>