[luatex] Why obsolete the fontforge name space?

Yue Wang yuleopen at gmail.com
Fri Jun 19 16:38:17 CEST 2009


On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Hans Hagen<pragma at wxs.nl> wrote:
> Yue Wang wrote:
>
>> If there are sufficient funding, write such binding is beneficial.
>
> depends ... 99% of dev in the tex world is not funded and still beneficial
>
> anyway, it's not on our agenda so such a lib + binding would end up in the
> add-ons activities later on; also, such a library should just expose  data
> which then could be transformed to something else using lua, i.e. it makes
> no sense to let such a lib construct a fontforge like table
>
> actually, if the advantage is sought in faster loading keep in mind that
> it's the construction of the big tables that take runtime, and that will be
> true for all fontloaders (only faster processors and more mem can solve
> that; it's the price for flexibility and in the luatex project flexibility
> and opening up is more important than runtime; as such luatex will always be
> much slower than the other engines and fonts is just one aspect) (we have a
> few ideas for speedups but these might not show up before version 1.0)
>

Li Yanrui's profile results confirms my opinion:
during font loading, Lua uses very short time to build tables. most of
the time are used by fontforge (parsing fonts and calculating).
see http://yuleopen.googlepages.com/prof.txt

and it is difficult to optimize fontforge there are several, not just
one or two, functions takes very long time to execute.


> the standard built-in fontloader datastructures are quite specific and will
> stay close to what fontforge does if only because it makes developing fonts
> as well as debugging lua code easier (for instance same internal feature
> interfaces) while other fontlibs might have a completely different exposure
> of font characteristics
>
> Hans
>
>
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