Re: xfree fonts

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh at sharif dot edu>]

On Wed, 19 Feb 2003, Nadim Shaikli wrote:

>  1. Do you know if XFree86 is going to play games and strip out
>     the much needed Form-B glyphs upon installation ?  If so, can
>     we convince them not to do that (we tried once before and I
>     don't know what came of it, but we didn't succeed :-)

That's not XFree86, but Markus Kuhn himself that's stripping those. I have 
also tried that to no success. It's not efficient he says, and that's all.
He is trying to invent a new BDF mechanism to support sparse fonts, and he 
has told me he will post his thoughts to the fonts at xfree86 mailing list 
once he finishes that. That's all I know.

I just use the font on the systems in our lab, and also redistribute them 
through FarsiWeb web site.

>  2. In the fonts noted in the links above - 3 have form-B glyphs.
>     10x20, 9x15 and 9x15B -- but the later two have problems.
>     I don't have time right now to investigate the missing glyph(s),
>     but there is definitely at least one that's not there as it
>     relates to arabic.
>     Try to use those fonts to view the fakkir.net/~nadim/ar_utf8
>     file (there for a limited time :-) and note how the Alef in
>     Allah is not properly displayed (there are others in the file
>     as you scroll down I believe) - the 10x20 font is fine.

There are many many Arabic-related problems in 9x15 and 9x15B, it's
incomplete, it's ugly, .... They are drawn by a German I guess. I never
found the time to went through them and fix the glyphs, I only did that
for 10x20 which I used more frequently on machine.

Any volunteers for that? This involves redrawing a bitmap font with a very 
good bitmap font editor called xmbdfed.

roozbeh