RE: How to use Japanese True Type fonts?

["Jonathan Shore" <jshore@example.com>]

Hi -

This was something I was planning to investigate - just having purchased
100+ truetype japanese fonts.  One thing you can do is generating the
rasterized form of the font from the truetype master for specific point
sizes.  This is a far from ideal treatment but might suit your purposes.

Does the truetype rendering capability of the X server use anti-aliasing?
This is the one area visually where rasterizing would fall short.

If anyone comes up with a solution for truetype rendering would love to here
about it.  I'll hack around with this myself and see if I can find a way to
do it.

cheers

Jonathan Shore
E-Publishing Group K.K.


-----Original Message-----
From: mfabian@example.com [mailto:mfabian@example.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2000 7:19 PM
To: tlug@example.com
Subject: How to use Japanese True Type fonts?


Has anybody tried to use Japanese True Type fonts with Linux?

What is the best way to do this? Which fontserver can be recommended
for that purpose?

I tried to use the free Japanese True Type fonts available from:

http://www.linux.or.jp/~ishikawa/linux/dists/FreeType/xtt-fonts_0.19990222-3
.tar.gz

Until now I tried to use these fonts with XFree86-4.0 (should have
support for True Type fonts already build in) and with the font server
'xfstt' but without any success.

First I tried it with XFree86-4.0.  I unpacked the tarball (which
contains the fonts, fonts.dir, and fonts.alias files), and added the
directory to X's fontpath with

    xset fp+ `pwd`

Now 'xlsfonts' lists these Japanese True Type fonts, it shows for
example the fonts

    -watanabe-mincho-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
    -watanabe-mincho-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-jisx0208.1983-0

among many others. But I can't display any of these fonts with 'xfd':

    mfabian@example.com:~/xtt-fonts-0.19990222$ xfd -fn
"-watanabe-mincho-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-jisx0208.1983-0"
Warning: Cannot convert string
"-watanabe-mincho-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-jisx0208.1983-0" to type
FontStruct
xfd:  no font to display

Then I deleted the original fonts.dir and fonts.alias and created
a new fonts.dir with the 'ttmkfdir' utility:

    mfabian@example.com:~/xtt-fonts-0.19990222$ ttmkfdir > fonts.dir
    unknown font foundry code LYJS
    unknown font foundry code LYJS
    mfabian@example.com:~/xtt-fonts-0.19990222$ cat fonts.dir
    8




watanabe-mincho.ttf -misc-unknown-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-jisx0201.1976
-0




watanabe-mincho.ttf -misc-unknown-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-jisx0208.1983
-0




watanabe-mincho.ttf -misc-unknown-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-jisx0201.1976
-0




watanabe-mincho.ttf -misc-unknown-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-jisx0208.1983
-0




wadalab-gothic.ttf -misc-unknown-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-jisx0201.1976-
0




wadalab-gothic.ttf -misc-unknown-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-jisx0208.1983-
0




wadalab-gothic.ttf -misc-unknown-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-jisx0201.1976-
0




wadalab-gothic.ttf -misc-unknown-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-jisx0208.1983-
0

Now 'xfd' can display one of these fonts:

    mfabian@example.com:~/xtt-fonts-0.19990222$ xfd -fn
"-misc-unknown-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-jisx0208.1983-0"

but unfortunately only the first page (first 256 characters, i.e. only
ASCII characters are displayed).

Then I tried to use xfstt. I used the option '--unstrap' when starting
'xfstt' (according to the documentation this option is necessary to
display more then the first 256 characters in a font) and started the
X-server with the option '-deferglyphs 16' (this is also recommended
in the documentation of xfstt). But nevertheless, 'xfd' did never show
me more than the first 256 characters.

Maybe XFree86-4.0 and xfstt are not able to display Japanese True Type
fonts?

Has anybody tried X-TT (http://x-tt.dsl.gr.jp/)? Does this work
better? According to the installation manual of X-TT it is distributed
in form of patches against XFree86 3.3.5, so maybe this doesn't work
with XFree86-4.0 at all?

--
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>

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