[GRASS5] grass font

Somesh Agarwal agarwal_somesh at yahoo.com
Sun Jun 24 05:26:51 EDT 2001


Radim Blazek wrote:

> On Fri 15. June 2001 17:07, Glynn Clements wrote:
> > There are three basic types of fonts: stroked, outline and bitmap.
> >
> > GRASS fonts are stroked fonts; these correspond to the way in which
> > you write with a pen on paper.
> >
> > PostScript and TrueType fonts are (usually) outline fonts; you could
> > convert these to stroked fonts, but the end result would be "hollow"
> > characters.
>
> Even hollow characters would be help at his time for those who use ps.map
> because editing by d.labels would be possible.
>
> > You can display a font on any platform, if you can obtain the font
> > definition; the main issue here is copyright. Otherwise, you have to
> > limit yourself to fonts which you know will exist on any platform;
> > unfortunately this probably limits you to Helvetica, Times and
> > Courier. Users of languages which use encodings other than ISO-8859-1
> > are out of luck; many systems won't have any fonts for non-European
> > languages.
>
> I don't think this is a problem. If user need to work in more languages
> he/she must install appropriate fonts. I found following fonts on my RH7.1 CD:
>
> intlfonts-Asian-1.2-1 intlfonts-Ethiopic-1.2-1 intlfonts-Chinese.BIG-1.2-1
> intlfonts-Chinese.X-1.2-1 intlfonts-Chinese-1.2-1 intlfonts-Japanese.BIG-1.2-1
> intlfonts-Japanese.X-1.2-1 intlfonts-Japanese-1.2-1 intlfonts-Korean.X-1.2-1
> intlfonts-Misc-1.2-1 intlfonts-TrueType-1.2-1 intlfonts-Type1-1.2-1
> kon2-fonts-0.3.9b-6 ttfonts-1.0-3 XFree86-cyrillic-fonts-4.0.3-5
> XFree86-ISO8859-2-Type1-fonts-4.0.3-5  XFree86-ISO8859-2-100dpi-fonts-4.0.3-5
> XFree86-ISO8859-7-Type1-fonts-1.0-9 XFree86-ISO8859-7-100dpi-fonts-1.0-9
> XFree86-ISO8859-7-75dpi-fonts-1.0-9 XFree86-ISO8859-9-100dpi-fonts-2.1.2-16
> XFree86-ISO8859-9-75dpi-fonts-2.1.2-16 XFree86-jpfonts-2.0-12
> XFree86-KOI8-R-100dpi-fonts-1.0-6 XFree86-KOI8-R-75dpi-fonts-1.0-6
>
> > Font handling will be a major factor in determining any new display
> > architecture.
> >
> > At present, potential architectures can be split into two categories:
> >
> > 1. Generate PostScript; all drivers (apart from one for a PostScript
> > printer) would use ghostscript to do most of the work.
> >
> > 2. Do everything ourselves.
> >
> > Option 1 saves us a lot of work, but also imposes some restrictions.
> > Option 2 is much more work (to do it right), but doesn't impose any
> > restrictions.
> >
> > One of the advantages of using PostScript is that it provides a lot of
> > desirable features "for free", e.g. affine transformations and
> > (decent) text rendering. However, internationalisation issues may
> > determine whether its text rendering is suitable; if it isn't, and we
> > have to implement our own text renderer, this eliminates one of the
> > biggest advantages of using it.
>
> This is probably more general question if we need WYSIWYG or not.
> I think that editing in WYSIWYG must be possible for creating final
> outputs for printing. However I was thinking about using some sort of
> WYSIWYM it may not be used in GIS because processing may not
> be done automaticaly like in TeX.
>
> But editing in WYSIWYG is needed only for some tasks (labeling, legends, ...)
> and for other tasks it is not desired (digitize, view/query on screen, ...).
> In my case, it would be about 80% NONWYSIWYG and 20% WYSIWYG.
>
> If wysiwyg is not needed, wysiwyg system would be terribly slow (I think).
> Remember that GIS is quite different from usual applications like text
> processing. In GIS we need to display very quickly thousands of lines and
> texts (usually at least more than 10 000). We should have full control over
> whole proces from source of data to calling XDrawText() or similar function.
>
> Create our own system for WYSIWYG would be huge work (and never true
> WYSIWYG), in cases it is required, we should use ghostscript.
>
> So my conclusion is that 2 modes should be possible:
> 1. nonwysiwyg for common work, speed optimised
> 2. wysiwyg for map finishing, slow, based on ghostscript
>
> Radim
>
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looking at this picture , I have being working on this for quite sometime ,
I have being able to use freetype font rendering engine to generate
bitmaps which then i can throw on the screen using raster methods.
More enhancements can be done on this .What say people.

somesh



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