user defined character sets are limited to 256 characters. It can
be typical for Asian docs to contain 1000-2000 unique
characters. Therefore the driver has to maintain a list of font
descriptor numbers and when it downloads a character, it has
to search for it in the list of font descriptors. It is not a major
problem. There are drivers today that manage this. I just
want to make sure that people realize there some work
involved in the driver to make it work.
Sandra Matts
Sandra Matts
Engineer Scientist
Hewlett-Packard
sandram@boi.hp.com
208-396-4755 phone
Boise, ID 83714
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-upd@pwg.org [mailto:owner-upd@pwg.org]On Behalf Of Norbert
Schade
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 2:04 PM
To: UPD group
Subject: UPD> further input to font handling
Having checked user defined character sets in PCL over the week-end I think
this is a good direction to go.
I explained why a UPD has to have the ability to define and download user
defined character sets in PostScript (only one character set per font, only
few predefined char sets). So we would add few sections to the driver
development to extend this functionality to PCL. We can use Unicode in PCL
character set definitions.
This would make UPDF practically independent from character sets for device
fonts. It saves time when creating the UPDF font section. It makes the font
description significantly shorter. It may even be more efficient in
performance.
I realize that it can happen that we redefine a character set, which was
already a perfect match as a predefined, in certain cases.
The only challenge would be to add the necessary functionality for PCL.
A future switch to direct Unicode support in the PDL would then be little
more than a finger snip.
I still believe that we need the character set functionality described last
Friday for dynamic character selection additionally, as some fonts may come
with only "almost" perfect match from the font vendor, as some PDL may not
offer a dynamic user defined character set.
But for PCL 5, PCL 6 and PostScript this will make our life easier - and of
those, who will write the UPDF.
Norbert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Feb 17 2000 - 15:37:57 EST