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From: roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Why does a font need an Encoding vector?
Message-ID: <1990Oct31.225607.10364@phri.nyu.edu>
Date: 31 Oct 90 22:56:07 GMT
Sender: news@phri.nyu.edu (News System)
Organization: Public Health Research Institute, New York City
Lines: 24


	The Red Book says that the Encoding vector is a required item for
all fonts.  Why?  Is there some bit of internal PS font machinery that uses
it?  As far as I can tell, it's only used by the font-supplied BuildChar
routine.  What if I wanted to write a font in which there really wasn't any
reason to use the Encoding vector at all?  Maybe what I wanted to do was
have a font in which each character was simply a circle of thickness 30 and
radius c, centered in a 1000 unit square space, where c is the ascii code
for the character?  No reason for an Encoding vector, just:

	/BuildChar {
		1000 0 setcharwidth
		exch begin
		newpath 30 setlinewidth
		500 exch 500 exch 0 360 arc stroke
	} def

	Why wouldn't that work, other than the fact that definefont would
complain that there was an Encoding key-value pair missing?
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"Arcane?  Did you say arcane?  It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"