Vlad wrote:
> What do you think about all this?
Sorry that this is long -
Concerning fonts on UNIX - I don't think that we have *any* business
shipping our own fonts. This is bad for many reasons. We should be using the
fonts available to us - i.e. those that X11 or GnomePrint or whatever we're
using ships with.
Shipping our own fonts does "solve" a few problems like assuring that "Times
New Roman" exists since Abi seems to like that font a lot. Also, it lets us
dump the contents of the PFAs and PFBs used in our documents to the PS
output file.
IMHO, there has to be a better way to create PS output from our document
that does not involve us dumping font metrics into PS headers at the
beginning of every new page. This not only makes our PS output bloated, but
limits us to outputting PS only on Unix-like platforms. I guess in this
regard, I'm referring back to the RFP for "XP PS" that I think thomasf asked
for a few months ago.
What does this mean for us? Well, someone needs to learn PS better and write
a new PostScript Graphics driver for Abi. We also need to clean up some
issues with our handling of fonts (on all platforms) in general. Maybe
GR_Fonts should have a few members, like 'name' and 'point size' instead of
being a completely abstract class. This is a large project and probably
require some large amount of changes to our graphic and font classes,
especially GR_UnixGraphics and the whole unix font mess (UnixFont,
UnixFontManager, UnixFontXLFD, PSFont, ...).
But I see the need for this anyway when GTK 2.0 ships with Pango. We'll
probably want to use the PangoFont abstraction around X/GDK Fonts and use
Pango's shaping routines to draw to our GDK GCs.
IMHO, everything proposed to date is just a "band-aid" (r)(tm) around what I
view to be a much larger problem. However, this band-aid might be preferable
to any proposed alternative because the alternatives are a huge and complex
undertaking. Suggestions?
Dom
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