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Re: [docbook-apps] Re: Hebrew Characters in PDFs
Bob Stayton wrote:
On Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 10:50:00PM +0200, Tobias Reif wrote:
Norman Walsh wrote:
> You need to get a font that contains the Unicode characters and
> configure your print tool to use that font.
It would be so great if all FO=>PDF converters would find the available
fonts by themselves, just like good web browsers do.
Like with CSS I want to specify a list of fonts ordered by stylistic
preference, and if a required glyph can't be found in any of those, the
tool should go look through the other fonts available on the box.
I wish it was that easy for print output.
Yep, me too. And I do believe that more aspects could be automated and
made more convenient.
For HTML output, the browser knows where the available
screen fonts are because the browser is configured into
the display system.
An quite analogously the FO renderer should be able to find the
available fonts by itself, no?
But an FO processor would not
automatically know where to look for font metric files
that are usable for print output.
It would be great if FO renderers wouldn't require manual configuration
for each document set. If my document contains characters for which
there are no glyphs in the fonts I listed via styling code the renderer
should go look for the glyphs, on its own. I never want to be required
to do manual font configuration on a per-document basis (think dynamic
environments: I could not know what characters are contained in the next
document, and I'd have to search for suitable fonts myself) and I never
want to be required to find out which font contains the required glyphs;
that's the job of the renderer AFAICS.
Posting a message to docbook-apps "Which font contains russian
characters?" simply is not an optimal solution.
Even if it finds
a font file, it needs to know if it can be legally embedded
in PDF output.
It could reference it by default, and if embedding is requested then ask
for a list of fonts it is allowed to embed. So when I want embedded
fonts then I could set up a list of fonts my app is allowed embed, once
and for all docs.
On the other hand, once a font is configured into an FO
processor, it would be nice if it would automatically
use it. That is, when a Unicode character is not found
in any of the fonts specified in the current
font-family property, then the processor could scan through
other configured fonts.
Exactly!
Shouldn't it be able to find the glyphs even if there is no font metrics
configuration for that font, by searching through all available fonts?
(those fonts that browsers etc find on that specific box)
With FOP I get a # for each of those characters, which is not acceptable
at all (no offense to the FOP developers), IMHO.
On the third hand, where are all the Unicode fonts that
have all the glyphs, so we don't have to juggle fonts?
Not practical, I suppose.
I want to choose "Arial, sans-serif" in my style code, but if there's
Japanese text for which Arial doesn't provide glyphs then I want to see
nice Japanese characters in my PDF. I suspect this could be made a lot
more convenient than it is now, especially with FOP.
Tobi
--
http://www.pinkjuice.com/
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