Re: [Gnome-print] Font database

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris ximian com>]

Hello!

On 11 Jun 2001 00:39:26 -0700, Erlend Nagel wrote:
> that would go some way towards making font installation/configuration
> on the Linux etc. platform easier. But could we in the process move
> the default fontmap file to /etc/fonts, along with a fontpaths file? 

Surely. I very much wish I can drop font management stuff from 
gnome-print as soon, as there is system-wide place to get necessary
information. Until now the only universal font system has been X
font database - hmmm - no more words about that...
Btw. What is fontpaths file?

> And while we change the format of the file, we might as well add a
> version tag, so that install programs can tell if they need to
> convert an old fontmap file to a new version.

I used:
<fontmap version="2.0">
for latest gnome-print fontmap. The original one was without version -
so lack of version was considered 1.0.

> Another thing that bugs me (almost enough to start coding, and
> certainly more than the absence of colour gradients) is that there is
> no way to view the installed fonts on gnome-print other than to
> figure out which fontmap file is used by gnome-print and then looking
> at the contents of the file.

Hmmm...
Good point. Actually font selector from gnome-print > 0.23? displays
installed fonts WYSIWYG. Writing font viewer will make something like
50 lines of code (you can look inside testprint4.c from gnome-print).
But the actual problem is, that most programs cannot do anything with
WYSIWYG fonts - they need X fonts, and so are using loose matching
to find working X font. Gnumeric font display is such example - and
with reason...
The only program known to me, using antialiased fonts directly (and
having full-featured font selector), is sodipodi. But well - it is not
real text-writing application too..

So maybe writing font-viewer would make sense. But if XST start to
manage more of font system, it will surely belong there. Or it should
be merged with gfontsel or something.


Best wishes,
Lauris Kaplinski