2001-03-30 08:58:21 UTC
Greetings to those die-hard followers of this project. We've been keeping very quiet for several months. But I have to admit that interest in the project has not completely died away.
There were, in fact, several reasons for keeping quiet:
* It appeared that Sun and Javasoft might finally come up with a multi-lingual printing solution which would make this project unnecessary. (As yet, it hasn't happened.)
* There are XML/XSL formatter projects (such as FOP and Xalan) under way at
http://xml.apache.org; we did not want to develop in complete ignorance of these efforts.
* There are a few fundamental issues that need to be addressed before going too much further. Among them: font metrics, metrics for very large codesets (i.e., Asian codesets), general path drawing primitives (which was not in the original project scope).
* This project was leaning toward CIDFonts and Javasoft has been staying away from them, relying instead on TrueType. In that light, I wanted to see if this project was fatally flawed.
* There is just a bunch of learning curve in understanding how to deal with the design issues. Some are just plain hard.
Nevertheless, we still periodically receive queries about the project. It still seems that no one has matched our attempt to do multi-lingual PostScript or PDF.
I personally have had additional opportunity to see what some potential users are up against, and continue to talk with people who are charged with assembling multi-lingual PostScript printing solutions. It has been enlightening.
The intent at this time is to continue to slowly creep forward, particularly on the multi-lingual front. The code base actually was not very far from simultaneously supporting multiple languages. A prototype of that exists in the 0.1 distribution as extra/FontInfoInit-cns.java.
So if you write comments here, I and my co-horts are still reading them.
--Rick Kwan
