[vox-tech] fonts and web pages

[Ken Herron]

> according to opera, i have 3 garamond families:
>
>    garamond [Monotype]
>    garamond [Freefont]
>    garamond [Xft]
>
>
> according to gimp, i have 2 garamond families:
>
>    garamond [freefont]  -> only provides an italic font
>    garamond [monotype]  -> very large family.
>
> 1. why 3 families in opera and 2 in gimp?  i doubt xft is an opera
>    supplied font.

Xft isn't really a family. It's a different method for accessing fonts. 
Under the original X font model, the X server was in charge of fonts. The 
client would just tell the server what font to use; the server would 
locate the necessary character definitions and render them into dots for 
the display.

Xft changes that. It's a client-side font library. Using it, the client 
renders characters into images and passes the bitmaps to the server.

Applications have to be specially written to use Xft. Apparently your 
copy of opera can use it while gimp doesn't.

> 2. tex has MANY "type 1" garamond fonts.  X supports "type 1" fonts.
>    why can't a browser use tex's "type 1" garamond fonts?

Tex doesn't read type1 files directly. It reads a tfm file containing 
font metrics (height, width, etc. for each character) built from the afm 
file. Tex doesn't need rendering information about the fonts it uses, so 
your tex installation may not have all the info that X would need.

> 3. can i use <FONT> to instruct a browser to use Monotype's Garamond
>    instead of Freetype's?

Not as far as I know, but I'm not up to date on html standards.


-- 
Kenneth Herron  Kherron@newsguy.com     916-366-7338