Re: Arabic fonts & XFree86

[Markus Kuhn <Markus dot Kuhn at cl dot cam dot ac dot uk>]

Nadim Shaikli wrote on 2002-01-03 02:12 UTC:
> It would be wonderful if the added form-B would included to 10x20 in
> the upcoming XFree86 release.

As Roozbeh Pournader said, the original 10x20.bdf master file
in

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz

contains these glyphs already. However a special Perl script
"bdftruncate" is applied to these files before they are installed in
XFree86, in order to remove all characters above 0x3000. This
reduces the size of the XFontStruct data structure from 700 kB to
100 kB, and is a hack around a serious inefficiency problem with
the X11 API for dealing with sparse 16-bit fonts. See the README
file for more details.

All you have to do is to get the original 10x20.bdf/pcf from
the above package and install it in XFree86 without the application
of bdftruncate.

A suggested but not yet implemented solution is font subsetting:

  http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/i18n/2001-September/002448.html

May be you can have a look at implementing this?

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>