On Fri, 26 Apr 2002, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>
>
> > > No, FreeType is independent of any system font mechanism; it
> > > parses the font files and gives you the glyphs as bitmaps.
> >
> > You really must use fontconfig on UNIX though to get the list of
> > available fonts, font names, etc. though. I don't think shipping a
> > custom set of fonts with AbiWord is really any good at all for users.
> > We're getting GTK, Qt, Mozilla, everything on fontconfig, please don't
> > create exceptions... things are such a mess right now and fontconfig
> > is such a good idea...
>
> The problem we have with fonts on Unix is (1) we can only use
> scalable fonts (2) we have to be able to use the font on screen and
> to be able to generate PS output with it. Most fonts installed on a
> typical Unix do not fall into this category, so we either ship our own
> set of fonts, or develop a mechanism for filtering unsuitable fonts
> out. The former is what we do, the latter is what we should do, but
> we need to take it one thing at a time.
>
A solution is to just use gnome-font but then we don't have a gtk-only
build for unix. That wouldn't bother me very much. gnome will ship with
late model Solaris and HP_UX anyway and we have AbiWord-1.0.x for small
devices using linux.
Cheers
Martin
