Re: [docbook-apps] Re: Hebrew Characters in PDFs

[Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com>]

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

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