[cairo] Cairo, Fonts and Illustrator

[Adrian Johnson]

Davide Rambaldi wrote:
> THE QUESTIONS:
> 
> 1) for lines, rectangles and filled rectangle the problem is that the 
> fill and the stroke of a rectangle are separeted objects for Illustrator 
> (so the user must delete the fill of an object and reapply another fill 
> inside illustrator). 
> 
> May be I call fill and stoke function in the wrong way, actually I am 
> doing something like this (in Perl):

Currently the PDF backend fills and strokes paths as separate 
operations. I am planning to fix this so that the fill and stroke 
operator can be used.

> the glyphs are rendered with the font BitStreamVeraSansMono, my Preview 
> software (and also Acrobat) on the laptop can see the font, while 
> loading in Illustrator I got the message:
> 
> "The font BitstreamVeraSansMono is missing.  Affected text will be 
> displayed using a substitute font."
> 
> The font is rendered with a series of ??????? and is recognized by 
> Illustrator as <BitStreamVeraSansMono◊>. 
> 
> I have installed the very same true type font on my laptop just taking 
> from the server the file Vera.ttf and installing into my FontBook on the 
> laptop. Problem is the Illustrator recognized this new font as 
> "Bitstream Vera Sans" type "Roman" and doesn't recognize the font.

There is also a bug report[1] for the same problem with PostScript 
files. Cairo subsets the fonts it embeds in PDF and PostScript files to 
reduce the size of PDF files and to avoid running out of memory in 
PostScript printers. It looks like Illustrator needs the complete font 
to be embedded for the file to be editable. Fixing this requires some 
additional cairo API to provide more control over how fonts are embedded.

There has been some discussion about adding an API to control font 
subsetting and it is on the ROADMAP for 1.6 [2]. However I have not yet 
started working on this so this feature will probably have to wait until 
  1.8.

[1] http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13433
[2] http://www.cairographics.org/roadmap/