[cl-typesetting-devel] Re: [cl-typesetting-announce] cl-typesetting at work!

[Marc Battyani]

"Peter Seibel" <peter at javamonkey.com> wrote

> Hmmm. I noticed that to so I printed it, hoping that would clear
> things up. No dice. Of course I have no idea how printing really
> works; I'm using CUPS on a GNU/Linux box printing to a hp LaserJet
> 2200d--for all I know the same code is being used to convert from PDF
> to Postscript as xpdf uses to render. Marc, can you give a 30 second
> overview of how fonts work in cl-pdf, cl-typesetting, or PDF
> generally? For instance, is all the font data embedded in a PDF
> document? If so where does it come from? If not, how are the fonts
> supposed to be found when it is rendered on a different machine?

There are 14 predifined fonts in the pdf format (corresponding to the AFM
files in the AFM directory). Every pdf renderer must be able to render them.
The other fonts must be embedded. I added support for T1 fonts and Suresh
Madhu sent me code for T3 fonts (not yet integrated)
The font metrics (the AFM files) define all the dimensional characteristics
of the fonts. But not the strokes/data for rendering them. The rendering
data can be in the form of T1, T3 and TrueType font data.
There are also encodings for mapping char-codes to the glyphs.

> P.S. I've been working on a pic replacement based on cl-pdf that I've
> been using to generate figures for my book. The code is still pretty
> grotty but here are some figures I've generated.
>
>   <http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/figures.html>

Very nice! How about full graphs like graphwiz ?
(maybe you should box the specials with another box style)

> *I* think they're pretty; better than the ASCII art I was using before
> anyway. I'll eventually polish up the code and release it. In fact I
> may use it as an example in my book.

Great!

Marc