Re: Font specification question (for modifying plftable.h)

Hello Chris,

I’m very grateful for this, and for the pointer to the IRC channel, which I’ll use in the future.

About licensing - I’ll definitely look at the license and see whether I’m using them properly in my build (which adds some completely public-domain fonts for my own private use).

Thank you again!

Edward Mendelson
Contributing Editor
PC Magazine/PCMag.com



> On Mar 3, 2015, at 12:55 PM, Chris Liddell <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Right, our PCL guy says:
> 
> "PCL's pitch parameter is the characters per inch, it is used for
> spacing in fixed width characters and for horizontal motion index (see
> manual) for proportional fonts.  Instead of storing characters per
> inch we store centipoints per character in the table.  The value in
> the table is the default pitch.  So for courier - 600 centipoints per
> character is equal to 12 characters per inch.  Courier is fixed so all
> characters will be spaced 12 characters per inch.  Your font will be
> close to double the characters per inch, but for proportional fonts
> the pitch is only used for space width guidance and in a few other
> quirky circumstances.  Characters will have different width because it
> is a proportional font, so the 313 centipoints only refers to the
> space character (hmi).  The 720000.0 / 313 is  character per inch
> times 100 to avoid floating point."
> 
> Hopefully, that gives you enough to get you where you need to be.
> 
> 
> By the way, I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before, but you're likely to get better/faster responses by asking on our IRC channel #ghostscript on freenode (or go to www.ghostscript.com and there is a link to open it in a web based IRC client). This list (gs-devel) is rarely used now, only myself and one other active developer check it, and not regularly.
> 
> 
> 
> Also, obviously I'm not aware of your usage of ghostpcl, but I noticed you implied in a previous message that other people were using your customised version - I just wanted to make sure you were aware that although the source code is licensed under the AGPL, the TTF fonts for PCL are under a much more restricted license (beyond our control, I might add).
> 
> Chris
> 
> 
> On 03/03/15 10:43, Chris Liddell wrote:
>> We don't really support modifying the font table, since it effectively
>> breaks the printer compatibility that we support.
>> 
>> I'll point our resident PCL expert at this, and hopefully he'll reply.
>> 
>> Chris
>> 
>> 
>> On 28 February 2015 at 20:42, Edward Mendelson <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> Is there documentation for the font descriptors in plftable.h?
>>> 
>>> The GhostPDL documentation here -
>>> 
>>> http://svn.ghostscript.com/ghostscript/trunk/ghostpdl/doc/ghostpdl.pdf
>>> 
>>> - says
>>> 
>>> "To use a new set of TrueType fonts requires modifying the C code in the
>>> fi le pl/plftable.c. The C structure
>>> resident table contains a list of Windows TrueType font names. In the
>>> released package these names will
>>> correspond with the Windows True Type font names in the URW font set. To
>>> use a di fferent font set these
>>> names must be replaced with the new font names and the code (at least the
>>> plftable.c module) should be
>>> recompiled and linked."
>>> 
>>> I've had no trouble adding monospace fonts to plftable.h (I use a licensed
>>> Prestige Elite TTF), but I'm baffled by one thing about proportional fonts.
>>> The code in plftable.h includes lines like this for each font (this example
>>> is from Albertus Medium):
>>> 
>>> {0, 1, {313.0, 720000.0 / 313.0}, 0, REGULAR, MEDIUMBOLD, 4362, 27},
>>> 
>>> My question is: what does "313.0" measure? And, since I'm asking, what
>>> does 720000 measure? (I understand that the printer internal unit is 1/7200
>>> inch, but I don't know whether this is another way of indicating that same
>>> unit.)
>>> 
>>> Many thanks for any help with this.
>>> 
>>> Edward Mendelson
>>> Contributing Editor
>>> PC Magazine/PCMag.com
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> gs-devel mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> http://ghostscript.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gs-devel
>>> 
>> 
> 


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