Speedo fonts - Are they still supported?

[Roland Mainz]

"Mike A. Harris" wrote:
> > Someone just caught me in IRC with this, and I couldn't quickly
> > determine the answer, and don't use speedo fonts myself so I thought
> > I'd pass the question on here:
> >
> > I've been getting some bug reports about speedo fonts not working.
> > The speedo module was removed from Xorg, presumeably because
> > freetype handles speedo fonts now (unless I am mistaken).
> >
> > Can someone state canonically wether speedo fonts are still supported
> > or not, and wether that depends on particular freetype releases or
> > not?  Should it work both with the server standalone, as well as
> > using xfs?
> >
> > If speedo is not supported however, then we should not install
> > the speedo font files anymore.
> 
> After chatting with others a bit, nobody seemed to know why
> speedo no longer works, so I dug into it deeper and discovered
> the following:
> 
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548

That issue was debated long long ago what we should do with the old
rasterizers (Speedo, PS Type1 etc.). For Speedo the issue was that AFAIK
no new fonts were made within the last 10 (or more) years, TrueType has
AFAIK superset all of it's functionality, a couple of Unicies (AFAIK
Solaris and AIX) dropped support for Speedo fonts and all the Speedo
fonts distributed at X.org are available as PS Type1 fonts, too. So far
it made sense to get rid of it to save some bytes in the Xserver code...

> Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2004 15:34:12 -0700
> From: Roland Mainz <xorg-commit at pdx.freedesktop.org>
> To: xorg-commit at pdx.freedesktop.org
> X-BeenThere: xorg-commit at freedesktop.org
> Subject: CVS Update: xc (branch: trunk)
> 
> CVSROOT:        /cvs/xorg
> Module name:    xc
> Changes by:     gisburn at pdx.    04/04/25 15:34:12
> 
> Log message:
>    Fix for
> http://pdx.freedesktop.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=548 - RFE:
> Remove Speedo font support from the Xorg default build
> 
> Modified files:
>        ./:
>          ChangeLog
>        xc/config/cf/:
>          X11.tmpl site.def xfree86.cf xorg.cf
> 
>    Revision      Changes    Path
>    1.3           +9 -1      xc/ChangeLog
>    1.3           +8 -8      xc/config/cf/X11.tmpl
>    1.3           +2 -0      xc/config/cf/site.def
>    1.3           +2 -2      xc/config/cf/xfree86.cf
>    1.3           +3 -3      xc/config/cf/xorg.cf
> 
> Since we are seeing several people reporting bugs now, that fonts
> that previously worked fine, no longer work, this was kindof
> surprising because X.Org still supplies these fonts *and* installs
> them by default.
> 
> I have no strong feelings either way as to wether this gets fixed
> by re-enabling speedo font support, or by preventing the speedo fonts
> from getting installed and/or removing them from CVS, as there have
> only been a few people file bug reports.

Fixing the "make install" to not installing the Speedo fonts when the
Speedo font rasterizer is not build is fine (erm... we may run into
trouble with Xvnc unless that Xserver has Egbert's code to drop font
path elements with invalid/unsupported content) - but those fonts should
not be removed until the same is done with the xc/lib/font/speedo/
rasterizer. I'd like to avoid killing the code for now until it is clear
whether the FreeType2 library gets Speedo support or not - once they
made a final decision the fate of the Speedo rasterizer+fonts should be
debated here.

Another issue is whether the Speedo fonts shipped in the X.org tree
should be replaced with PS Type1 versions of the same fonts - does
anyone know whether this will trigger any licensing issues ?

----

Bye,
Roland

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