[XeTeX] CID-keyed font support?

[Jiang Jiang]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 8:28 PM, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 07:18:10PM +0200, Jiang Jiang wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 6:27 PM, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> wrote:
>> > On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 09:01:32AM +0200, Jiang Jiang wrote:
>> >> Hi,
>> >>
>> >> On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 8:07 AM, Peter Breitenlohner <peb at mppmu.mpg.de> wrote:
>> >> > On Wed, 23 Jul 2014, Jiang Jiang wrote:
>> >> >
>> >> >> Since Peter is not responding, ....
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> > Hi Jiang Jiang,
>> >> >
>> >> > that was on purpose because I am not the maintainer and don't know too much
>> >> > abaout that program.  All I did were purely technical things such as
>> >> > identifying identical code in the two programs, code cleanup (C language
>> >> > bugs and compiler warnings) and general TeX Live infrastructure.
>> >>
>> >> OK, sorry about that. So who is the maintainer of dvipdfm-x then?
>> >
>> > I partly do, and it happens that I was in the middle of some major
>> > refactoring removing most of the different font loading paths between
>> > dvipdfmx and xdvipdfmx (in preparation of their eventual merger) and
>> > this of course is conflicting with your changes. I had to revert them
>> > locally for now, and will need to figure out how to re-do it again since
>> > the fc_face member of the various font structure is almost gone.
>>
>> There has to be a FT_Face somewhere, right?
>
> Probably not, at least unless absolutely required.

I'm not sure it's a good idea. I looked at your changes and I'd rather
it to be the other way around, remove the legacy dvipdfm-x code and
replace it with FreeType calls instead. At a glance I felt that
FreeType code is way better maintained and in a much better shape than
dvipdfm-x code, I can't remember how many times I see "FIXME" and
"This should be fixed" in dvipdfm-x code base. Take CFF and CID font
support for instance, I suspect that we will have to spent 10 times
more effort to correct the current dvipdfm-x code while FreeType has
high quality code (some contributed by Adobe themselves) ready for
use. While unifying the dvipdfmx and xdvipdfmx is a goal worth
pursuing I doubt it will actually bring a higher quality version to
XeTeX users in the next release.

- Jiang