OSDL DTL Tech Board: Fonts & Linux (Thu, Aug 31)

[Liam R E Quin]

On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 19:26 +0200, Jan Claeys wrote:
> Op wo, 30-08-2006 te 01:13 -0700, schreef James Richard Tyrer:
[problems using Type 1 fonts]

> 
> IMHO those TrueType font files have incorrect font family fields.
> (But the reason for that is that the foundries have to do this because
> Windows font family handling is broken--Mac TrueType fonts might have
> this different!)

First, they are Type 1 fonts (although there are also problems with TT).

The majority of professional-quality fonts used in graphic design are
still Type 1, although the industry is moving to OpenType, so that
will probably change over the next 10 to 20 years.

The majority of cheap knock-off fonts are of course in TrueType.

There are both good and bad fonts in both formats, but if Linux is to
be able to support graphic design professionals it needs a better
story on the PostScript Type 1 font front.

Most programs seem to fail altogether with Expert Sets, for example.

> I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "16 faces in a jumbled order", but
> there must be a better solution than copying Windows's broken behaviour.

For the Mac, there are 3rd party programs that "reunite family members"
to change the order in which fonts are listed, using a database of
font names plus some heuristics.  It would be hubris to expect to
do better given the same input data (with or without a database).

Of course, a distributed font family/name/weight/version/license/foundry
database could be built, and might be very useful for other reasons.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
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