[cups.development] Fonts for texttopdf

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Tobias Hoffmann <lprint-list at the-axe-effect.de> writes:

> Hi,
> I'm currently working as GSoC Student[1] on the texttopdf[2] and 
> pdftojis[3] filters for a PDF based workflow on *nix.
>
> The texttopdf filter (which is derived from texttops of CUPS) should now
> support non-latin scripts, e.g. CJK and right-to-left. texttops already 
> some support, but one problem is, that the currently used font (Courier)
> is not enough.
>
> So my question are:
> - Which is a good font (on which platform) for embedding
>    for the purpose of pdf printing workflow, and
> - What is the best way of going about it (code to scavenge/reference),
>    as for example CJK fonts might be quite large, and OTF is not 
> (easily) supported for PDF<1.6, to name a few constraints.

Rather than decide fonts yourself, why not ask the system.  You should
be able to use fontconfig for this purpose, possibly in combination
with a texttopdf configuration file as a fallback in case fontconfig
is not available.  Of course, you'd still need candidates for that
configuration file ...
# FWIW, poppler and cairo also use fontconfig and CUPS uses poppler
# (or xpdf), well, at least on my Debian lenny system.

Also, some languages have rather peculiar rules with respect to "word"
wrapping.  I don't know how, or if, you are handling this, but you may
want to take a look at libtextwrap to deal with this.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen                   FLOSS Engineer -- AVASYS Corporation
FSF Associate Member #1962           sign up at http://member.fsf.org/