chowell@chum.WV.TEK.COM (11/16/90)
In looking at the new .pcf (portable compiled font) font format in the R4 .../contrib/server from DEC, I noticed that the glyph names are included in the .pcf file. What are the glyph names used for? Any help would be appreciated. --------------------------------------------------------------------------
erik@westworld.esd.sgi.com (Erik Fortune) (11/21/90)
The Display Postscript extension (DPS) uses glyph names and the scalable widths of characters. You can change the encoding (ordering) of glyphs on the fly in DPS, so it asks for glyphs by name instead of position. DPS uses scalable widths (as opposed to bitmap widths) to do WYSIWIG formatting. If you never use DPS, you can safely omit scalable widths and glyph names to save space. The font reader deals gracefully with missing tables, and the server will only complain if one of the tables it needs (metrics, bitmaps, properties, accelerators or encoding) is missing. You could also write some fairly straightforward code to re-encode a font to some other character set (IBM PC, EBCDIC, etc). -- Erik