[Open Office] OpenSymbol font nasties ...

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Ilko / Tom,

On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 14:01, Ilko Hoepping wrote:
> I do not really know what your needs are, but I can give some 
> information about the OpenSymbol and StarSymbol font.

	Thanks for the great information; for the benefit of those who are new
to this here is the problem:

	Sun ships 'StarSymbol' which contains symbols which match with mapping
tables in vcl/source/gdi/fontcvt.cxx. The font appears to contain many
duplicates - however these are in fact metrically different versions of
similar characters. Since many fonts eg. wingdings, webdings map to the
same 'StarSymbol' font - there are many regions each with a distinctive
offset eg. 0xe100 contains much of the Adobe ("symbol") glyphs, 0xe300
all of the "webdings" glyphs etc. StarSymbol is a propriatory font from
AGFA which the Free software community cannot use.

	Thankfully, before licensing this font, Sun had it's own version -
starbats / stardings (?) which it has munged together to produce the
'OpenSymbol' font ( extras/source/truetype/symbol/opens___.ttf ).
However - all is not well with OpenSymbol, while it contains many useful
glyphs, in very many cases it doesn't contain them at the offsets
expected (equivalent to the StarSymbol offsets). Thus eg. much of the
crucial Adobe ("symbol") font mapping points to non-existent characters
in the 0xe100 range.

	In order to fix this, I have done some quick, ugly, initial cut &
pasting action of opens___.ttf - copying glyphs from their previous
locations, to new locations inside the font. This has the effect of
creating visually similar (ie. a bullet not a box) glyphs, but naturally
with substantially incorrect metrics.

	It is my feeling that it is indisputably better to have some similar
looking glyph than just a box ;-) The new re-arranged font can be found
here: http://ooo.ximian.com/openoffice/fonts/.

	So - this is not a complete solution, indeed I'd like Novell to invest
some artist time in merging in some of the new glyphs that were drawn
for our LingDings / NetDings fonts to incorporate them into OpenSymbol.

	However - it seems to me that TrueType files are an aweful format for
CVS use, extremely difficult to manage, and may easily lead to horrible
problems with merging in glyphs. Thankfully there is pfaedit's native
file format - which suffers from none of these problems - is text based,
and can be trivially diffed / patched; Thus:

* Proposal 1

	We should switch opens___.ttf to a dual-font scheme, with the
authoritative version being an OpenSymbol.sfd file that we can easily
deal with / accept multiple contributions from, and that we should also
keep the generated binary opens___.ttf in CVS - since while we could
incorporate a pfaedit script into the build, it's not a reasonable
requirement.

* Proposal 2

	We should start working together on expanding and filling out the
opensymbol font to eventually obsolete the StarSymbol font; starting by
getting the above into CVS [ all under the JCA etc. ].

	I'd very much appreciate your input on this, and look forward to
working together.

	Thanks,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael@ximian.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot