Re: [xmlroff] two simple questions

[Tony G. <Ton...@Su...>]

Noah Levitt wrote at 16 Mar 2003 12:27:24 -0500:
 > On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 17:51:54 +0000, Tony Graham wrote:
 > > 
 > > I could add an embed/no-embed flag to the PDF backend of PangoPDF
 > > fairly easily, but per-font embedding control would require an
 > > enhancement to fontconfig.
 > > 
 > 
 > Could you explain what the enhancement to fontconfig would
 > be? I'd like to file a feature request at
 > http://fontconfig.org/bugzilla/ because I think it's an
 > important feature for xmlroff to have.

Part of the problem is that I'm unsure of exactly what is required.

Ideally fontconfig would be able to provide an embed/no-embed flag as
part of the information about a font, just like you can get the font's
filename from fontconfig.

The embed/no-embed information would presumably come from the
fonts.conf file, but that potentially means putting a lot of specific
font names in fonts.conf whereas the fonts.conf file is currently
pretty generic.

It is possible to imagine a more localized embed/no-embed control file
in each directory containing fonts, but that's a big stretch for the
current fontconfig.

The other side of the problem is supporting users who have varying
needs for embedding fonts.  If you want to embed fonts some of the
time but not all of the time or you want to sometimes embed every font
despite what the improved fontconfig tells you, that would be pretty
easy to handle with a three-state flag to PangoPDF.  But what if you
want to embed different subsets of fonts depending on where you expect
the output PDF to be used, e.g., embed none for use on your machine,
embed more for use within your company, and embed all but the standard
14 Adobe fonts for use outside your company?

That gets into having embed/no-embed controls outside of fontconfig or
having embedding profiles in fontconfig, both of which would be messy.

 > What would be required for xmlroff to support embedding only
 > the subsets of the fonts that are actually used in the
 > document?

It would require PDFlib to support it, or changing the PDF generation
library used by PangoPDF.

What I really want is a library that will embed subsets of CJK fonts.

 > By the way, thanks for xmlroff and pangopdf. I hope you
 > succeed in getting pangopdf merged into pango.

Thanks.

PangoPDF probably has to prove its worth (and use a less encumbered
PDF library) before it can be accepted into Pango itself.  In the
short term, I'd be happy if I didn't have to invent so many -private.h
files just to be able to subclass some Pango objects.

Regards,


Tony Graham
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