Re: ISO 10646 fonts in GTK+

[Robert Brady <rwb197 ecs soton ac uk>]

On 16 Aug 1999, Owen Taylor wrote:

> > If it does work, probably a medium-term hack would involve forcing 
> > *-iso10646-1 fonts to have their ranges set to 0x0000 to 0x00ff in GDK 
> > somewhere. Would this be an acceptable solution for 1.2?
> 
> That is closer to being acceptable, but I believe the correct
> solution is simply to specify the encoding for the fonts
> that GTK+ loads by default; having it as a wildcard really
> never made sense (I can conceive of people using this to
> get their native character set by arranging their font path,
> but that was 

This solution had not occurred to me. It certainly makes sense, and would
be trivial to do. (just change -*-* to -iso8859-1) in gtkstyle.c (and,
for completeness, the test program). Will this happen in the next stable
release of GTK+?

The downside of this is that it does not magically fix applications.
It is hard to estimate, but on cvs.gnome.org, there are 95 files which
call gdk_load_font, some files calling it multiply, and a fair proportion
of these use -*-*. There are no doubt many apps not in cvs that use
similar strings. They will _all_ break when pointed at iso10646-1 fonts.

If you aren't convinced by that argument, which I admit isn't very
strong, then I suppose I had better get making patches to send off to the
appropriate maintainers...

-- 
Robert
(Ancalimon)