Linux and application installing

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mercredi 08 septembre 2010 à 21:35 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot a écrit :

> so by combining code from both it should be possible to create a small
> utility that takes as argument a font file and a locale and generates a
> svg (or svgz) containing the pangram text for this locale with the
> shapes of the selected font file.

Another possibility would be to write an utility that takes a text file
and a font file as argument, and generates the smallest possible font
file subset sufficient to display this text. And then save the text and
font subset files, and use them to do the preview.

This could probably be almost as space efficient as the svg, and permit
higher quality previews, but I don't know of such an automatic
subsetting tool, it requires deep knowledge of font file innards, so
could probably only be created as a fontforge extension by fontforge
people. (though I'm sure woff users would like a user-friendly
subsetting tool)

I'm not sure the better preview quality is worth the complexity over
just copying whatever pango-view & gnome-font-viewer do to generate
svgs.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot