some project notes - March 2001
Status: Pre-Alpha
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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
Is anyone looking at this ?
Yes, the forum is being monitored. But nothing is actively happening. Most of the interested developers have moved on. Part of this was due to the potential of other available solutions; part was due to a need to properly scope out unwieldy future work. Key realities since 2001 are listed below.
PDF -- PostScript is interesting, but PDF is the really useful form of output, if it is available. The Apache FOP and Xalan communities were rapidly gaining strength, and were expected to do work in this area.
Multiple font formats -- The project was rapidly reaching the point of needing to know where font data resided on the host system, and interpreting the data to acquire font metric information. To complicate matters, TrueType and CIDFont are giving way to OpenType. For the foreseeable future, it seems a model covering all three is needed.
Font embedding -- This project assumed fonts resident on the printer. However, a very strong case can be made for font embedding. This requires ability to locate and read font data, and build an appropriate stream for embedding.
J2SE status -- The original problem with Sun's J2SE printing solution for Asian languages was their use of font outlining, which generated megabypes of irritation. Sun was apparantly aware of that they should be doing font embedding, and apparantly was taking steps to fix this. (I no longer had access to a platform to test this out, and thus never followed up.)