[xep-support] Re: Where to put true-type fonts?

From: Kevin Brown <kevin@renderx.com>
Date: Fri Nov 08 2013 - 10:20:52 PST

On one point in this thread, there was a request to do an autoload of fonts.
IMHO that is an impossible task.
How would XEP know that "foo.xyx" is really a font? You are certainly free
to name the file whatever you wish.
Then again, what about "Arial.ttf" which is *not* a font, just some file a
user put there --

The two things above would mean software that crawls a directory and looks
inside that directory's files one by one to test all the different font
types and then makes sure they are named and gathered together into the
proper variants.

And still, you could have unanswered questions -- embedding (yes/no),
subsetting (yes/no), any ligatures, what are they? Do you wish to do faux
slanting, if yes how much angle?

And lastly, adding a whole directory of fonts -- which could be huge --
would be performance killing. You do not want your XEP.xml to have all of
those fonts as they are at least parsed at Java start-up.

If you run x4u.bat/x4u.sh, there is a tab for editing the configuration
screen which includes selecting and have the application add the font
properly.

I have seen an application developed by one of our customers that did crawl
the windows directory and provide a list to users to select the ones to add
and did the modifications in xep.xml for you. That was many years ago
though, can't even remember which customer.

Kevin Brown
RenderX

-----Original Message-----
From: xep-support-bounces@renderx.com
[mailto:xep-support-bounces@renderx.com] On Behalf Of Jeffrey Walton
Sent: Friday, November 08, 2013 7:58 AM
To: jens quade
Cc: RenderX Community Support List
Subject: [xep-support] Re: Where to put true-type fonts?

On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 10:49 AM, jens quade <jq@qdevelop.de> wrote:
>>> ...
>>
>> A better solution might be to add the trailing slash since the user
>> already gave you the path he/she wants to use; and then print an
>> informational that the trailing slash was added on their behalf. In
>> this case, the system "just works" and it relieves the user from
>> being an RFC expert.
>
> That better solution would hopefully refrain from using the xml:base
attribute at all, and define it's own attribute, say "path-prefix" or
something like that.
>
> Because next person comes around the corner, pasts a
http://www.wheremyfontsareliving.com/fonts/font1.ttf in xml:base an expects
this to just work, too.
>
Yep, we do all kind of unexpected and dumb things.

Remember, all we [dumb users] want to do is get on with our task at hand,
which is writing the document. We don't don't want to be DocBook
administrators because it takes time away from our primary goals of writing
the document.

For what its worth, XEP is a cool product. It lays out a document
beautifully. It beats the snot out of Word, Write, Pages, FOP, Troff (and so
many others I have tried). But the font problems are a real pain point for
those who don't have the knowledge.

Jeff

!DSPAM:87,527d0a1d9859148846180!

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Received on Fri Nov 8 10:21:18 2013

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