Older blog entries for GrahamAsher (starting at number 2)

This is my first entry for a hell of a long time, I see. Well, I worked for Artifex for two periods of several months with a gap in the middle, ending in April 2003. I eventually finished the GhostScript incremental font loading system and general bridge between GhostScript and FreeType, but unfortunately it is unlikely to become an official part of GhostScript because of difficulties in matching up what GhostScript wants and what FreeType can provide; Artifex eventually put the whole thing aside, and that was the right thing to do. I wasn't working on this full-time, and wasn't able to get familiar enough with GhostScript internals to sort out the problems. GhostScript is very complicated, and entirely C, and makes use of many home-grown conventions; and it has grown like the accretion disk of a nascent galaxy, and over roughly the same timescale.

It was very pleasant working with the Artifex people, especially Raph and Miles. They tolerated my slow progress for a long time ;-)

In my spare time I am working on a new mapping project, CartoType. This isn't open-source, or freeware, or even shareware, but makes use of whatever open-source components it can, like FreeType. I'll be feeding back any fixes and other useful new stuff I discover into the open-source components that I use, so it won't be all take and no give.

I now have a very rough design worked out for the incremental FreeType font system. The idea is to support any kind of font loaded by GhostScript that can be added to incrementally. I am doing this generically by designing an interface that contains a very small number of functions (well, two at the moment) for getting font information. (It's a pain doing this in C - it would be easier and cleaner in C++. I have argued ad nauseam for a C++ rewrite of FreeType, and have actually done some of this work myself, but not for public release unfortunately. So you will have to take my word that it works like a Swiss watch;- ) ) Anyway, the idea is that to open an incremental font, like, say, a Type 42 font with no glyph table, you supply a new member of FT_Open_Args that points to your object implementing the new interface. FreeType stores this new arg in the FT_Face object and uses its functions where appropriate - in this case, to get glyph data from the PostScript font's GlyphDirectory.

Yesterday I started working for Artifex on adding a new module to FreeType to enable it to render dynamically modifiable fonts presented to it by GhostScript. This stuff is to be released publicly so I guess I can talk about it here.

First task: get hold of the latest versions of FreeType and GhostScript, build them from source, and figure out how GhostScript loads fonts. And try to understand the existing bridge between GhostScript and Agfa-Monotype's UFST.