On Fri, 11 May 2001, Cyrille Chepelov wrote:
> Le Fri, May 11, 2001, � 02:56:29PM -0500, Lars Clausen a �crit:
>
>> Given that this would add another library dependence, I think it should
>> be optional, but I'm willing to put some time into getting it up. Not
>> for this release, obviously, but definitely before 1.0.
>
> You're not actually advocating rasterising the fonts ourselves, are you ?
>
> However, if you really are, then maybe this would give rotated text
> (<kidding>I've already done this, bwahahahaha</kidding>).
No, the FreeType library renders for us. Including rotating^H^H^Hed text.
> Simple problem: how do you know what the font path is (call&parse "xset
> q", OK), and how to access the non-local fonts (ban XFS-accessed fonts,
> acceptable if we ban X terminals, OK).
I don't, FreeType does.
> (another, a bit dirty but probably effective *and* easy solution to
> render Type1 fonts would be to simply download them into the Display PS
> renderer... we keep some of X's "elegance", but we still add a bunch
> dependencies (DPS, and a DPS client. We'd get bitten a bit by the latter,
> since DPS-X is not yet easily packageable (because of Freeness issues
> with the AFPL half), and the former DGS as done by the Gyve project has
> been unpackaged (dropped) in Debian. Sucks but true).
When I tried it out, it didn't seem ready at all. Lots of bugs and
crashes.
>> I haven't looked into how well it works, but it sounds better than
>> waiting for Pango and the like.
>
> We *will* have to use Pango when we can use it, anyway. I don't know for
> you, but I really don't want to handle i18n and multiple scripts
> myself. The Pango team has done it, already (well, sort of, otherwise
> we'd already just linked it up).
How much difference will it be to use Pango? I would like to have all text
handling encapsulated (no calls to gtk_text_width etc), so we can easily
pick. And note that I'm suggesting this as an optional library.
>> I've seen installations (BSD's in particular) that didn't have all the
>> standard PostScript fonts for X, so only a few font selections were
>> available. Is that better than just using the X fonts and risk worse
>> printing?
>
> What worse printing ? I'd think raster fonts are totally out of the
> discussion, aren't they ?
Well, you're discussing them above, aren't you:) For one thing, a high DPI
rastering is preferable to not having the font at all. Second, from what I
see in the FreeType mailing list, it handles conversion to Type, so we
wouldn't need to raster for PostScript.
Well, I'm about to head off to Europe for three weeks. I'll be in
intermittent email contact. I have no problems with the current tarball,
though I hope all of you will bang at it till it compiles jcleanly under
all configuration combos.
-Lars
--
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause) | H�rdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I | Retainer of Sir Kegg
will defend to the death your right to say it." | of Westfield
--Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire | Chaos Berserker of Khorne
