[arch-general] Firefox dropping support for OTB fonts as well?

[Samir Nassar]

Hello,

>From https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/05/25/pango-future-directions/ "Using Harfbuzz for font loading means that we will lose support for bitmap and type1 fonts. We think this is an acceptable trade-off, but others might disagree."

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*Stop using **freetype*

Freetypes FT_Face object has locking semantics that are broken and hard to work with; they are constantly getting in the way as we are juggling hb_fonts, FT_Face and cairo scaled font objects.

We’ve concluded that the best way forward is to stop using freetype for font loading or accessing font and glyph metrics. We can use Harfbuzz for all of these (a small gap[https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/pull/1432] will be closed soon).

Using Harfbuzz for font loading means that we will lose support for bitmap and type1 fonts. We think this is an acceptable trade-off, but others might disagree. Note that Harfbuzz /does/ support loading bitmap-only OpenType fonts.
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