Re: [docbook-apps] Re: Hebrew Characters in PDFs (fwd)

[David Tolpin <dvd at davidashen dot net>]

Hi,

1) While FOPs approach to adding fonts to the set available to the renderer is flawed,
XSL FO provides no means of automatic selection of font families beyond those explicitly
listed as a value of  attribute 'font-family', and even with more system-bound implementations,
such as AntennaHouse (which makes all fonts installed on a Windows box accessible), a
formatter should not use a family that is not listed.

How it should report a failure to find a glyph is a different matter.


2) While it is possible to improve an XSL FO implementation to make it choose default
fonts according to the language used in the document, there is no way in XSL FO to
instruct an implementation to substitute non-default font-families beyond those specified
in CSS (serif, sans-serif, fantasy...).

(The same is true for Web browsers: if a page takes the freedom of explicitely assigning
font families to HTML tags, and the fonts are not available on a particular system,
a complete mess often follows. The only remedy is to prohibit use of custom
font names, which many good browsers allow and many wise users do.)

3) Returning to docbook-apps, the best approach, im my extremely humble opinion, is to
use logical (generic?) families and then have an additional processing in the stylesheets
pipelines to substitute font families from a set of available fonts instead. 

Just using generic font families do not seem to be sufficient; different substitutions
should be performed for different languages. On the other hand, the configuration itself,
both as a data structure and a process, would be straightforward.

Well, I'll try to write a simple stylesheet for font lookup. It seems to me that using
language and font-family as arguments is good enough for this purpose.

David

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