On 22 Nov 2000, Lars Clausen wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Nov 2000, James Henstridge wrote:
>
> > Font handling under X sucks. There is no easy way to go from an X font
> > name to the type1 outline font (and it may not even be a Type1 font,
> > so might be unusable from postscript).
> >
> > That is why dia limits you to the standard postscript fonts. You can set
> > up your X server so that it provides the URW fonts under the adobe
> > names. There is a question in the FAQ on the website about it.
>
> Does Gnome have better font handling? Or is there some other font-handling
> library around we could use? Eventually, something will have to be done
> about this -- my (now former) officemate couldn't use Dia because the font
> handling was so bad. Bad fonts really hurt Dia.
There is gnome-print, which can provide better font handling. At the
moment, dia uses it as a print backend. But gnome-print also provides
font handling, which we aren't using at the moment.
If we made gnome-print a requirement, we could use these features. Among
other things, it has the ability to get font metrics without the X server
and they have been adding unicode support. However, gnome-print has been
under pretty heavy development recently (the new postscript driver had a
number of big bugs last I checked).
James.
