Re: [Gnome-print] [PATCH] fix big i18n problem in gnome-rfont.c

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris ximian com>]

Hello!

I'll look at your patch. I messed a lot with t fonts/encodings and got quite
bad feeling about the whole issue - but if that works, I'll try to include
these.

Btw. Do you mean, that if there is not exact match for default charset font,
current gnome-print gives you the right size scalable latin1 font, instead of giving
slightly bigger or smaller font with correct charset?

But as of print preview, the actual problem lies in gnumeric, not in gnome-print.
All gnome-print text input expect full unicode strings. Gnumeric is currently
completely encoding agnostic, converting all texts to unicode as if they are
iso-8859-1. Even, if there happen to be cyrrilic fonts/fonts with cyrillic
glyphs for gnome-print, it cannot use them, as everything is in latin1.

The another orthogonal problem I have encountered is, that many "russian" type1
fonts are actually hacked fonts with cyrillic glyphs but latin1 glyph names. They
happen to work correctly for completely agnostic systems, believing to deal with
latin1, but actually dealing with some cyrillic encoding. But the DO NOT WORK with
gnome-print, because gnome-print reads comoposes its transcoding tables according
to the data present in font headers - i.e. latin1 glyph names, thus dealing those
fonts as covering only latin1.

Hopefully these problems will gradually go away, as more and more programs and
fonts become unicode aware. But these are almost unavoidable consequences of migration
from 8-bit locales to unicode - the biggest migration laying just ahead, as migration
to gtk+ 2.0/Pango.

Best wishes
Lauris Kaplinski

On 08 Mar 2001 19:53:01 +0400, Vlad Harchev wrote:
> 
>  Hi, 
> 
>  Here is a patch for GP-0.25 that fixes a very serious problem in
> gdf_find_measured_gdk_font(..):gnome-rfont.c. It's a missing "-*" in the
> registry-encoding field - without it (i.e. when the XLFD with insufficient
> number of fields is passed to XQueryFont) XLib will return some font that
> matches that pattern, but that has different charset from current locale's
> one. This is fatal for non-latin1 locales and without this fix, all apps will
> use fonts (at least for some sizes) that don't have glyphs needed (e.g.
> russian strings are unreadable in gnumeric since latin1 font is used when font
> is 8 or 18 points high).
> 
>  It would be nice if this fix was included with gnome-print shipped with
> gnome-1.4. What do you think about this?
> 
>  Unfortunately, print preview and printing using gnomep-print (and gnumeric at
> least) are still totally broken with russian (since wrong glyphs - latin1
> ones- are used instead of russian ones - it's impossible to read anything
> printed in russian) - are you aware of that? I can provide you with any help
> you need in solving this problem.
> 
>  Thanks.
> 
>  Best regards,
>   -Vlad
>