That's a great start Norbert. Will these people be
able to attend the New Orleans meeting or
the next meeting in New York?
Sandra
-----Original Message-----
From: Norbert Schade [mailto:nschade at xionics.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2000 11:48 AM
To: UPD group
Subject: UPD> fonts
I would not call myself the absolute font expert, but I know this and that.
I invited Bitstream on January, 13th, to Oak (formerly Xionics, most of you
may have heard that the merge now is public and legal) to talk about the
subject.
They were interested in visiting the group. I told them about the next
meetings of our group especially mentioning New York. Don and Sandra, I hope
that's in your sense. They may take the chance to represent themselves.
With Bob Thomas, Director of Product Management, and Rob Solomon, Director
of Type Engineering, and Shawn Flynn, Senior Software Engineer, on
Bitstream's side and a colleague of mine as a font expert from the embedded
side plus myself we had a nice group together and could cover a lot of items
in little more than an hour on the management level as well as on the
technical level.
I introduced PWG and especially UPDF to them and told them my ideas about a
font approach (we must start somewhere).
1.) I think we should take the IFIMETRICS structure from NT and check,
whether this is the right superset for general font information. This
includes Panose info.
2.) We have to add character set handling and 3.) character width
information.
I propose we will not tell about the scaling formula for calculating single
char width explicitely in our XML file. I rather would expect that we assume
the driver knows about certain font formats including their scaling formulas
and we just reference that in a list.
4.) The relationship of system fonts to printer resident fonts with the
complexity of font substitution unfortunately is another item in this area.
I explained that I want us to investigate SVG and their font description
more before we decide on a spec.
Bitsteam generally agreed on all of that. They may even be interested to
think about a tool to provide a XML file per font (only newer ones) shipped
by Bitstream to be included easily into a complete UPDF. But that depends on
how sophisticated and convincing our concept will be. That's probably
something more for Sandra or Don.
So I gave it a kick-off.
The question for me now is: After coming back from other development today,
will I spend the remaining days on constraints or prepare fonts further
more. I am open to proposals.
Norbert