A general purpose font module for multilingual application programs

SUMMARY Multilingual information processing technology has enabled us to handle the text of many languages and scripts. Technical difficulties, however, still remain in the field of displaying and printing text. Windowing systems and printers often lack support for scripts that are not widely used and there has been no simple and flexible remedy for this problem. In this paper, we describe the general font module VFlib for multilingual text. VFlib knows how fonts are represented in different font formats and obtains glyphs as bitmap images from various font files. As VFlib provides a unified interface for font access, application programs can employ many font types without handling their details. We have also implemented previewers and printer drivers that use VFlib as the font retrieval module. These application programs include a program named ps-multi that prints multi-script text created with the multilingual text editor Emacs Version 20 or later. From our experiences of implementing these application programs, we believe that VFlib is a simple and powerful solution for multi-script text printing and displaying.