[tex-k] Plans about supporting TrueType/Type42 fonts in dvips?

[Vladimir Volovich]

"PV" == Paul Vojta writes:

 PV> I have looked into supporting TrueType in xdvi.  A key subsidiary
 PV> issue that came up (and stopped it for me) was compatibility with
 PV> ttf2tfm and ttf2pk.  They come up with their own character
 PV> encoding that basically (as I recall) chooses the lowest-numbered
 PV> 255 or 256 available characters into the encoding vector.  Adding
 PV> to the difficulties is the fact that ttf2tfm/ttf2pk use the old
 PV> (version 1) freetype library.  I tried porting these programs to
 PV> freetype2, but the latter lacks some features of the original
 PV> freetype, and is never likely to have them (Werner Lemberg said
 PV> that programs should use pango instead for these features).

above you wrote "I have looked into supporting TrueType in xdvi",
which as far as i understand shall mean ability to render (using
freetype library) glyphs directly from TrueType fonts, and of course
also selecting the needed glyphs of the TrueType fonts according to
the ReEncodeFont instructions from the MAP files.

yet, later you write about ttf2tfm and ttf2pk and how they are using
old freetype library etc.

i do not see any relation between "support of TrueType in xdvi" and
those two programs - ttf2tfm and ttf2pk. there is no relation
whatsoever. ttf2tfm is one of the many ways to create TFM metrics from
the TrueType fonts, and ttf2pk is, as you know, just a converter from
TrueType to PK for those programs which DO NOT support TrueType, and
thus need to fall back to use PK fonts.

could you please explain what do you mean?

Best,
v.