Metric Information

[Lars Hellström]

At 10.02 +0200 2002-07-25, Patrick Gundlach wrote:
>Lars Hellström  <Lars.Hellstrom@math.umu.se> writes:
>
>
>Hi,
>
>> >And is this a general failing of UNIX systems:
>> >how does Linux, for example handle post script fonts and the metrics
>> >that go along with it?
>>
>> That would probably be the concern of the windowing system rather than the
>> OS, but it would be interesting to hear an explanation of how this works.
>
>
>Right the core OS (=any Unix kernel) has no idea what
>a font is. The X11 windowing system has access to the fonts in the
>system and can display them as well as provide some info to the
>programmer: (The following has been found in the ref manual and not
>used in practice, so this has to be taken with care)
>
>The XCharStruct has info about the side bearings, height and depth (ascent
>and descent) of characters in a font.
[...]

Thanks, but I was rather thinking about: what files does the windowing
system get this information from, how does it know where to find them (is
there something like a psfonts.map?), and where are the files typically
located? The (mostly) C programmers interfaces are, for better and worse,
usually of no interest to us TeX-font-hackers (unless we're writing a DVI
previewer or driver).

Lars Hellström