Re: dia 0.90: printing Japanese using --enable-freetype ?

[Mike Fabian <mfabian suse de>]

Mike Fabian <mfabian@suse.de> writes:

> Cyrille Chepelov <cyrille@chepelov.org> writes:
>
>>> The problem is not only that one cannot print the Asian glyphs, one
>>> cannot print anything correctly when using these fonts, not even a
>>> simple ASCII string like "xyz". If this problem is solved, I guess
>>> printing will work for east Asian languages when '--enable-freetype'
>>> is used.
>>
>> Does it work, in your experience, when --disable-freetype ?
>
> No, Japanese printing does not work without '--enable-freetype'
> either. In that case fonts are not embedded into the PostScript
> output, printer resident (or Ghostscript resident) fonts are used
> instead.
>
> I could make Japanese printing work with dia-0.88.1 by applying the
> attached patch, but this patch doesn't work anymore for dia-0.90,
> because the reencoding of the fonts for printing seems to have been
> changed on dia-0.90 and I was unable to fix it.

[...]

> Unfortunately this patch doesn't work for Japanese anymore for
> dia-0.90, print_reencode seems to be gone in dia-0.90 and I could not
> yet find how to adapt this patch to make it work again.

Here I attach my current tentative patch against dia-0.90.

I believe parts of it are still useful, for example using
the URW fonts as the default fonts for display on X11 in
preference to the adobe bitmap fonts. Maybe you can include that
into the next version of dia.

For the entries concerning freetype in font_data[] I used
the URW fonts whereever possible as well because they
are free, available on most Linux distributions and closely
match the original Adobe PostScript fonts. This might be
useful for inclusion into the next version of dia as well.

For the Asian fonts I also added freetype related entries in
font_data[], using freely available TrueType fonts (the 'Baekmuk' font
for Korean, the 'Kochi' fonts for Japanese and the 'Arphic PL' fonts
for Chinese).

But I couldn't make the printing for Asian languages work again like
it did in dia-0.88.1. Therefore I tried '--enable-freetype' in the
hope that this would make printing of Asian languages possible.

I believe if the printing problem with '--enable-freetype' can be
solved, it is a better solution than the old printing support which I
used in dia-0.88.1 to print Japanese, because it embeds the fonts in
the PostScript output and therefore doesn't require the printer to
have the fonts. It is nice to be able to print CJK on any printer,
even without CJK fonts.

On top of that, when the freetype support is enabled, dia
automatically finds all installed TrueType and Type1 fonts in the X11
font-path, even those which are not mentioned in font_data[] at all.
This makes it very easy for the user to use other fonts with dia, one
just has to drop them in a directory in the X11 font path and that's
it.

Therefore I believe that freetype is the way to go for dia.

Is there an easy way to make the printing work for large fonts?

dia-fonts.dif

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@suse.de>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
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