[tlug] Re: XFree86 4.3.0 and truetype - followup

[Mike FABIAN <mfabian@example.com>]

Godwin Stewart <gstewart@example.com> さんは書きました:

> On Fri, 11 Apr 2003 14:42:56 +0200
> Mike FABIAN <mfabian@example.com> wrote:
>
>> As adding these options manually may be tedious, it may be helpful
>> to use my script
>> 
>> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian/misc/SuSEconfig.fonts/fonts-config
>> 
>> man-page:
>> 
>> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian/misc/SuSEconfig.fonts/fonts-config.1.gz
>
> Right at the minute I'm bogged down in some work for a Windows client,
> but I'll definitely look into this matter. The extra capabilities of xtt
> over freetype certainly look interesting.

They may be useful sometimes, therefore I added the automatic
generation of the special xtt-options to my script.

On the other hand xtt may also have disadvantages. It used to crash
far more often, but Chisato Yamauchi from Plamo-Linux fixed a few
serious problems recently, therefore xtt appears to be quite solid in
XFree86 4.3.0. And it is apparently not actively developed anymore.
It is freetype1 based whereas the "freetype" module in XFree86 4.3.0
is actively developed and already freetype2 based. "xtt" apparently
doesn't support iso8859-15 encoding, "freetype" does.

So whether the "freetype" or the "xtt" module is better depends on
what you need and what is most important to you.

> BTW, am I right in assuming that the way xtt simulates fonts on-screen
> has no bearing on what will be printed?

Usually not.

> i.e. if there is no such thing as a font in italic, it'll be printed
> "upright" even if it's displayed italic on-screen...

It can have weird effects in some unusual circumstances.  For example
if you switch of the fontembedding feature for printing in the Qt
configuration tool "qtconfig", then Qt tries to guess a suitable
PostScript font name from the XLFD and may this be influenced for
example by a artifical bold font from "xtt".

For example, if the XLFD looks like

   -foo-bar-bold-...

Qt will guess "/Bar-Bold" as the PostScript font name, which may or
may not exist. If this was an artificial bold font generated by "xtt",
then such a PostScript name certainly won't exist.  But usually "/Bar"
doesn't exist either unless you have a suitable alias in a Ghostscript
Fontmap.

My fonts-config script also tries to generate a
/usr/share/ghostscript/<version-number>/lib/Fontmap.X11-auto file with
aliases for Ghostscript which may help.  It requires "ftdump" to
generate this Fontmap.

Switching off the fontembedding feature of Qt is usually not a good
idea.

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。