Re: OT: FontForge (was: writing system)

On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 03:44:23AM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...> writes:
[...]
> > It probably does this by scan-converting bitmaps produced by MetaFont
> > at various sizes. I seriously doubt it's even possible to write a
> > general-purpose convertor (esp. to TT fonts) that can losslessly
> > convert arbitrary metafonts, since MetaFont is a full-fledged
> > programming language, and this would probably amount to an undecidable
> > computation. :-)
>
> But before rendering bitmaps, Metafont converts the program to cubic
> splines, so there is another level of generic representation that
> could be converted.  No idea whether it is used, but theoretically,
> it's possible to convert before bitmaps are rendered.
But that's still the easiest part of the process. The power of
Metafont is that font programs are parametrized, and the font programs
can act on the parameters in arbitrary ways. To truly capture the
entire quality of a Metafont, one would have to translate the function
of the program on its parameters into font hinting parameters. This is
the part that's probably infeasible or impossible to implement.
(NP-completeness or NP-hardness comes to mind... and likely
intractability.)


[...]
> > I'm still struggling as to whether I should do my conscript fonts in
> > MetaFont or TT. My personal tastes incline towards MetaFont,
>
> Mine, too. :-) Although Tyl Sjok was so tough that I needed a C
> program to compute glyphs in PostScript.  This was since Metafont and
> LaTeX unfortunately communicate at bitmap level, using ids (i.e.,
> charcodes) for the characters, which was very restricting for Tyl
> Sjok.  The theoretical total number of glyphs is enormous for Tyl
> Sjok.
Well, sanokí (Ebisédian's writing system) doesn't really have too
large a number of glyphs, but it is significant, so I wrote a program
to typeset it. :-)


> > but it is rather inaccessible by non-LaTeX crowds,
>
> More importantly, to web representation.  I would not pay attention to
> other OSes than the ones I use, because I doubt people want to learn
> my conlangs.  If there are requests, I will rethink my strategy. :-)
I'm generally willing to learn conlangs, if I get the chance to use it
reasonably often. :-)


> However, web representation is now much more important to me than a
> LaTeX document of my grammar, so Metafont is not my first choice
> anymore for that reason.  I usually use PostScript and render the font
> as graphics.
[...]

Nice. I can see how PS lends itself to this kind of thing. For
Ebisédian, though, I've no choice but to render it in LaTeX, 'cos no
other tool I know of can handle its painfully complex diacritic
composition rules (even just in the orthography alone, not even actual
sanokí).

P.S. OK, I regret responding to Andrew's post... of all people, I
should be much better clued to the fact that parody does not transmit
very well over the 'Net. I didn't intend for it to be auxlang bashing
any more than it is a caricature of, shall we say, the rather
advocative tone of the original post. I should've just hit the delete
button and let it be, like I usually do.


T

--
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will
eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the
Internet, we know this is not true. -- Robert Wilensk

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