Fonts (was Re: [etoys-dev] Wording in Clouds)

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 02.08.2009, at 22:10, Andreas Raab wrote:

> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> Not quite - the tag is 'OTTO' and there is neither a 'loca' nor  
>> 'glyf' table.
>
> Yup. Checked the spec and .otf is used specifically as extension for  
> Open Type fonts with postscript glyphs. If someone wants to look at  
> this you'll have to look at CFF (Compact Font Format) specification.  
> This is a bit out of scope for me right now.
>
>>>> As for dfonts, is there any info on those?
>> It is too easy. According to this article, ttf/ttc/otf are "Windows  
>> formats" that OS X supports but its native format is dfont:
>> http://support.apple.com/kb/TA22195
>> I couldn't find a format spec yet though. But it appears to embed  
>> ttfs literally.
>
> Right. I spent some time digging and all I could find on them is  
> that they are "data fork" fonts. I.e., where in the old days fonts  
> stored their contents in the "resource fork" the dfonts store them  
> in the data fork. Unfortunately, there does seem to be absolutely no  
> information about what the header looks like so I'm not going to dig  
> into this right now.

I found a C program that can extract the TTFs from a dfont:

http://fondu.sourceforge.net/

It points to documentation on Apple's dev web site but the links are  
outdated.

Anyway, for Etoys platform fonts are of secondary importance anyway.

> I think as far as deploying Etoys is concerned we are in a  
> reasonable state here - we can pick one or more fonts that are either:
> * Shipped directly with the download (Deja Vu etc)
> * Are available on the platform (Windows TTFs for example)
> * Can be downloaded as an add-on for Etoys from the web page

Right. IMHO we should not make it too easy to use platform fonts in  
Etoys, for sake of project compatibility. I think we should not change  
the current user interface (in particular not add the "external font"  
item). The Bitstream Vera family  in the image should be replaced with  
Deja Vu on disk, same for Komika. And we need to make sure older  
projects load correctly, and that's pretty much it, I hope.


- Bert -