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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Font embedding -- TrueType
From:       Lars Knoll <lars () trolltech ! com>
Date:       2003-08-14 8:11:25
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On Wednesday 13 August 2003 23:42, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> Lars Knoll wrote:
> > On Wednesday 13 August 2003 07:27, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> >>I have found that there *IS* a reason not to embed fonts -- TrueType
> >> fonts at least.
> >
> > Just FYI, there is also a big reason against it, at least when printing
> > to a postscript/pdf file: Document portability. Without embedding you
> > cannot rely on the receiver of the document seeing it exactly the same
> > way you do.
>
> You can have GhostScript or Acrobat embed the font when you make a PDF.
> Which would, again, be a better solution.  Not embedding would also be the
> normal choice when you send out a PS to be printed.

Depends on your system. Most printer drivers/ps generators that do a bit more 
than converting ascii to ps do embed fonts. As I said it's the only way you 
can generate portable postscript that can be also sent directly to a printer.

Yes, ghostscript can be configured to find these, but in case you have a 
postscript printer that's not what you want.

> But, in both cases, either the bug needs to be fixed on the PS files need
> to be edited by hand first. :-(

Looking into the bug. I agree that we should try to find out the correct PS 
font name from the font file if possible. Unfortunately on a lot of systems 
with server side fonts or a font server this is impossible. So we have to 
keep our heuristic name generation.

> But, I was just talking about printing on you own system.

Even then. I have a postscript printer, so I don't use ghostscript at all. I 
need font embedding.

> Is there any chance that Qt will have the feature like Scribus to choose
> which fonts are embedded?

It would surely be nice to have, the main issue is time on our side. We have 
to prioritize tasks, and currently we have more than enough other issues that 
we think are more important.

> >>Currently the Type 42 font embedding in Qt doesn't work so TrueType fonts
> >>are converted to Type 3 fonts which results is a loss of rendering
> >> quality.
> >
> > The quality loss you get from the conversion is rather small on high
> > resolution printers. What you loose is hinting and the effect of hinting
> > gets less and less as your resolution increases.
>
> Perhaps your converter is better than: "ttf2pt1" -- Type 1 fonts made with
> it don't look very good.

The real solution is to offer subsetting of type42 fonts in Qt. This is 
something i'd like to see in the future, as it would improve glyph quality 
while keeping the generated output rather small.

Lars
 
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