Re: [docbook-apps] Re: Hebrew Characters in PDFs -- Font Catalogs

[David Tolpin <dvd at davidashen dot net>]

> Norman Walsh wrote:
>  > You need to get a font that contains the Unicode characters and
>  > configure your print tool to use that font.
> 
> It would be so great if all FO=>PDF converters would find the available 
> fonts by themselves, just like good web browsers do.
> 
> Like with CSS I want to specify a list of fonts ordered by stylistic 
> preference,  and if a required glyph can't be found in any of those, the 
> tool should go look through the other fonts available on the box.
> 

While not all XSL FO renderers to PDF are able to choose glyphs among multiple
font families, the actual challenge is not how to register fonts in a rendering
systems. The challenge is a consistent and portable way to map a font family to a set
of available fonts.

Since, on one hand, mapping of font names to font foundries  is
  more or less consistent among renderers and platforms (that is,
  Arial is Arial, Times is Times - and as long as Schoolbook is
  available to a renderer it will be more or less the same Schoolbook
  in all renderers);

and, on the other hand, generic families  are mapped rather arbitrarily 
  to font families;

a good  approach would be to define all font family properties in terms  of logical
families and then map those logical families to font families through a lookup
table. I realize this can be implemented through customization; however, a unified approach
built into the core stylesheets seems to be worth implementing.

That way, 

1) documents would become portable between systems with help of the 'font catalogs';
2) localization would be much easier.

David Tolpin
http://davidashen.net/


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