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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: KWord and bitmap fonts
From:       Nicolas Goutte <nicog () snafu ! de>
Date:       2002-07-23 12:55:20
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On Dienstag, 23. Juli 2002 09:35, Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 July 2002 01:06, Nicolas Goutte wrote:
> > > > The point is that Clearlyu would be used for international characters
> > > > not in the type 1 font.
> > >
> > > Oh? Why? How do I reproduce?
> >
> > Why? Because the type 1 font is typically ISO-8859-1. (Well at least the
> > ones that I am using.) So the range outside ISO-8859-1 is composed by QT
> > with the help of other fonts. However on a typical
> > (old/default/non-TrueType) XFree system, the only Unicode font is
> > Clearlyu, which is a bitmap font!
>
> I'm not sure I follow you.. Qt does not use these ISO encodings anymore
> from Qt3 forward. Plus that Qt refuses to print bitmapped fonts I believe
> this can never be true.

QT3 hides that problem but does not make it disappear, as the fonts have not 
become Unicode ones by miracle. QT3 only simulates Unicode fonts by using 
fonts together.

For example you want an accented e in say "Lucidux Sans" (that is a ISO-8859-1 
Type 1 font). It works! If you want the Chinese character for water, as it is 
not in the font, QT searches it somewhere else, for example in "Clearlyu" 
(bitmap font). But for the user, it is still under the name "Lucidux Sans"!

And as told, you cannot print! That is exactly the problem! (You get an email 
from apsfilter with a message like:  "apsfilter: unable to print job 
kdeprint_1pDvFeB". So it seems that QT still tries to print it somehow.)

> I must again ask you to base your statements on actual fact and give me a
> way to reproduce.

Well, I have no problem to reproduce it. For you, I suppose that it is like 
for David with "Helvetica": as your system is made otherwise, you cannot see 
the problems. (I suppose that your system is TrueType-centric.)

My way to reproduce it:
- load an international text
- in KWord's style manager change the font to a type 1 font (for example 
"Lucidux Sans")
- at that point, it looks very nice on the screen and wherever you check the 
font name, KWord will tell you "Lucidux Sans", even if QT is using something 
else.
- try to print it!

As for which international text to use, well I uses one of AbiWord's test 
files. But for you to reproduce it, you could go to the site of the European 
Central Bank http://www.ecb.int , select Greek and then cut and paste into 
KWord. It gives exactly the same problem.

I, as now informed user, can understand why the printing does not work, but I 
see many bug reports coming for such problems.

As for the fonts on my system, well they are (only) those of XFree 4.0.2. 
XFree 4.2 seems to have still the same fonts, even if some have other names 
due to copyright problems.

>
> > (Sure, you will never be able to see any problem with any TrueType font,
> > as a TrueType font is automatically an Unicode font.)
>
> Hmm? And yesterday you could not even use TTF fonts :)

No, but I can read QFont's source code, especially qfont_x11.cpp. TrueType 
fonts are always considered to be Unicode fonts, despite how many or how few 
characters are defined.

> Above you said that the only unicode font was Clearlyu so this contradicts
> each other as well.

Clearlyu is the only Unicode font on a system without TrueType fonts.  (I am 
not talking about the fake Unicode fonts that are more or less ISO-8859-1 
fonts with symbol support.) 

If you use at least one TrueType font, I do not know how QT reacts, as QT has 
a choice between more than one Unicode font. (You could probably tweak the 
behaviour with QT's font substitution system.)

> In fact any font has a number of characters implemented. There is no font
> in the whole world that implements the whole unicode standard. Therefor you
> will always select fonts to print the chars you want. If I type a character
> the font does not have I get a little square. Qt does not automatically
> select another font for that character for me.

QT does, even if not character by character but at least by character groups. 
(So if the non-breaking space or the special quotes are not definied, you 
really get squares. If you use a Chinese character for example it searches 
somewhere else and does not display squares.)

Clearlyu has perhaps not all but many Unicode characters implemented. It is 
one of the fonts used by many translation teams as far as I can tell from the 
kde-i18n-doc mailing list. (The other ones being Microsoft's Unicode fonts, 
typically Arial.)

>
> > > > When you will print, as it is a bitmap font, you will get all the
> > > > problems that you try to avoid to have. Explain that to a normal
> > > > user...
> > >
> > > I hope we are both working toward a solution, this above sentence seems
> > > soo much like an attack on the way we print WYSIWYG :(
> >
> > I do not see any. You will need the international characters from
> > somewhere.
> >
> > That is one reason why I always thought that bitmap fonts were needed in
> > KWord (I should perhaps have more emphasized why I thought so.)
>
> But we can only use them for on screen, so its not really a solution.
> And there are lots of type1 fonts that implement cyrillic and other
> 'strange' characters.

Even with Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese, you do not 
get the world! (And that makes already at least 6 fonts to download!)

So in fact you are telling people that they should use "Arial" from Microsoft 
to be able to print some of the world languages. :-(

And what will happen the day that this font is not anymore downloadable from 
Microsoft? (It is already not distribuable.) We will then lose, as we will 
have lost one of KDE's main strength: the I18N. And especially the "small" 
languages will suffer, already those who are not supported by commercial 
products.

> Take a look at
> 	http://www.koffice.org/kword/pics/kword-arabic.png
> those are all Type1 fonts.  Debian has a big set of these, and I believe
> that other distros have those as well. (I remeber SuSE 6.2 having a big set
> of Chinese fonts)

I am not telling that you cannot do. I am telling that the normal user will 
not do, as he think that he has already the support for world languages.

>
> > (I suppose that rasterizing the KWord document and sending it as image to
> > the printer is *not* a solution.)
>
> Hehe; no. I don't want to re-implement the stuff Qt and KDEPRint allready
> did just to use fonts which will look jaggy on paper anyway.

> Again; there are fonts for non-latin1 characters. There is a good way to
> print those fonts. So there is simply no need to ever use bitmapped fonts.

Yes, just too bad that the best and simpliest solution is then from Microsoft.

Have a nice day/evening/night!
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