Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!intercon!news
From: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: What can you do to font dictionaries?
Message-ID: <1990Jan23.013927.3977@intercon.com>
Date: 23 Jan 90 01:39:27 GMT
Sender: @intercon.com
Reply-To: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Sterling, VA
Lines: 20

In the red book under the definition of "scalefont", it says that the
operator makes a copy of the specified font dictionary with a new FontMatrix
entry.  What I am wondering is whether it's legal to write functions that
do similar things with other entries in the font dictionary.  In particular,
writing an "encodefont" procedure that makes a copy of a font dictionary
with a new encoding vector (but *not* registering it under a new name with
definefont) seems to work just fine under every version of Adobe PostScript
that I've tried.  Since the font cache works on FID/character name pairs,
it doesn't strike me that doing this would confuse the font cache.

My particular application in this case is to create a Type 3 font which
uses re-encoded versions of a couple existing fonts, but which don't ever
get referred to explicitly anywhere else.

Does anyone know of any problems with this or prohibitions against it in Adobe
technotes?

Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation
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