At Mon, 23 Apr 2001 12:05:07 -0400, Michael Stone wrote: > > On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 12:52:30AM +0900, Yasuhiro Take wrote: > > The biggest problem about TrueType font configuration for X is the syntax > > of .scale file. X provides two backends to handle TrueType fonts, xtt > > backend > > and freetype backend. The former features dynamic decoration of TrueType > > font, > > which for example creates bold and italic faces from upright medium face. > > This feature requires additional parameters to .scale file. Its syntax is > > of course nonstandard, and conflicts with the syntax for the freetype > > backend. > > Since mutating fonts like this usually results in a crappy looking font > anyway, why don't we just configure the fonts we *really have* in a > standard format and leave any other mods to the user?
Because there's a consierable amount of demand for having italic and bold
faces of a font which has only an upright face, especially in CJK.
Only an upright face is ready for CJK fonts in general, while upright, bold,
italic, bolditalic faces are ready for Latin fonts. It is the first reason
why CJ(K) ttf packages provide the xtt .scale file.
The second reason is that XLFDs for dynamically generated italic & bold faces
of CJK TrueType fonts are widely used in CJK. Other major Linux distributions
in CJK ship the xtt .scale file for CJK TrueType fonts, because there's a
demand. It can be said that xtt .scale file is rather standard in CJK.
But it is not good that CJK ttf packages provide only xtt .scale file,
and should be amended.
To have users prepare the xtt .scale file and configure is a bit hard task, so
i think it is better that users can choose the backend. If we choosed to
'leave any other mods to the user', the following situation could happen.
Mr.J: I installed Debian yesterday.
Mr.K: Oh, that's nice. How is it?
Mr.J: It's wonderful, except that there's no italic and bold faces available
for Japanese TrueType fonts in X. I used Turb*Linux before, and these
faces were ready without doing extra byhand configuration. I have no
idea what i can do to solve this problem. Debian sucks.
Mr.K: ...
Thanks,
hirot
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