[tex-live] Metafont fonts and X (font server?)

[George N. White III]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 11:44 AM, Giuseppe Bilotta
<giuseppe.bilotta at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday 11 June 2008 15:41, George N. White III wrote:
>
>> My guess is that the X font machinery doesn't really have all the
>> capabilities needed to
>> support maths layout, so it may not be enought just to get bitmaps.
>
> If .mf support could be added to freetype, Xorg (and lots of other apps) would get it for
> free as well. Of course the problem is adding support for it to freetype. Maybe
> mplib could give a hand in that?

To me the question is whether the efforts to improve X support for
languages with
with other than left-to-right layout will prove adequate for maths.  I
suspect the
best we hope for is that the new machinery (both rendering engines and fonts)
can be tweaked to work for maths.  If we end up with some fundamentally
broken system, then something that renders .mf directly might make sense,
but then there would be pressure to extend .mf to support many more glyphs,
so we would need a new format and tools to convert .otf to .mf, etc.
I was kinda
hoping I might live long enough to see nice maths rendering become the
norm, not
something that takes much work and esoteric tools.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia