From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.20020107121609.01698b80@mail.real.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
From: Fariborz Tavakkolian <skipt@real.com>
Subject: Re: [9fans] Fonts
In-Reply-To: <20020107184129.B19A719A02@mail.cse.psu.edu>
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Date: Mon,  7 Jan 2002 12:16:09 -0800
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My immediate goal was to import bitmaps of the glyphs in Farsi
alphabet and to fillin the fonts in those unicode ranges. Longer term
goal is to import the curve descriptions for scaling of the glyphs (MAYBE).

Later it might be useful to import things like OpenType's shaping
information (sounds more grandiose than it is).  These are intstructions
for writing systems like Arabic, where, depending on a letter's location in
a word, one of upto 4 character variations can be used.

On second thought, it seems that "shaping" would properly belong in the
editing or input mechanism, as would the support for writing right-to-left.

At 01:41 PM 1/7/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>I don't think it would be too hard to adapt FreeType
>to be used to provide access to TrueType and Type1 fonts.
>The main issue that I don't understand is how to properly
>handle the Unicode character set; surely there is some
>comment inside the font files telling the encoding, and I
>expect you'd end up using description files just like we
>have today (cat $font).
>
>X bitmap fonts should be a bit easier -- just convert
>them into Plan 9 images, reorder the characters appropriately,
>and write a description file.
>
>For very small and even normal-sized terminal fonts,
>I think the Lucida fonts that Plan 9 uses are the clearest
>choice you've got, although I can imagine that if you
>wanted to write a WYSIAYG editor of sorts, you'd need
>some sort of rescalable fonts.
>
>Russ
>
>