On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Ronald L. Chichester wrote:
> The problem with fonts is difficult. It is not so much that you have
> the fonts loaded on your system (although that helps). The bigger
> problem comes when you load that file on another system that does not
> have those fonts. Then something (software) or someone (wetware) has to
[snip] Totally agreed, although some care must be taken with copyright
issues.
However, although it wasn't obvious, what I was advocating (and should do
if/when I have time) is to optionally render text as geometric shapes
(basically, filled beziers) instead of text in a specific font (this makes
bigger output, but perhaps more useful in some cases). In the particular
case of CGM import in MSWord, this would probably be useful.
James or Alex (I don't remember who exactly. Probably the former)
mentioned several weeks ago that Gill has that feature. I checked a couple
of days ago in the sources there, it seems that this feature is being
integrated right into gnome-print. Unfortunately, that's probably a
gnome-1.2 feature. And that would weld dia to GNOME, which is perhaps not
desirable (until now, it hasn't been desired).
> decide what alternative font gets used and how to use it. All too often
> the results are not pretty. Worse, there is also the display issue (X)
> versus the printing issue (Ghostscript). Both have to be solved to make
> a workable solution.
apt-get install gsfonts-x11
> Because Linux does not have an easy method for handling fonts, it is a
> safe bet that most people to whom you send a dia file will not have
> non-standard *ix fonts. Thus display and printing of the sent file is
> problematic.
Most people who send you document from a widely spread word processor from
a well-known company, even if they do bother to convert to "HTML" or RTF,
will still assume you have Times New Roman, Arial, Tahoma and Comic Sans MS.
> To solve this problem, it would be helpful to devote some effort into
> making the installation of fonts as easy as possible. Creating a font
> installer for Gnome would be a great start. Collecting freeware fonts
> into a central repository (e.g. http://fonts.gnome.org/) would be
> another suggestion.
This is a distribution issue, not a development one. I'm pretty satisfied
with the way Debian handles fonts. Never bothered to touch anything there :-)
OTOH, I'm not really demanding when it comes to fonts : I use onyl the
default X(GS) and TeX ones, and when I electronically export something, I
either demand a working TeX or a PDF viewer from the receiver. The only
things I miss are antialiasing and some kind of ClearType-like functions
in X.
-- Cyrille
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Grumpf.
