Around 9 o'clock on Nov 20, Brian Stell wrote:

> Here is a possible set of choices/fallbacks given a desired
> font name and desired font encoding-registry or language group (1).
> 
>  1) Name and encoding-registry / TT language group
>     Best choice.

Have you found the TT language group information to be useful in this 
environment?  I fear that far too many fonts will have misleading 
information in this field.  I suspect other operating systems ignore this 
field, which would cause it to be less than reliable.

>  2) Name, encoding-*  (applies to X fonts only)
>     Regroup fonts that were split apart from a larger font.

Good thing I don't have to worry about this; I'm not interested in fonts 
artificially split apart for the convenience of the core protocol.

> At each step of the way pick the font with the characteristics 
> that most nearly match the desired characteristics; eg: 
> bold/italic/thin/etc.

That's what the nearest matching semantics are supposed to arrange.

> To avoid unneeded searching the search only proceeds down the list far
> enough to satisfy the characters that have been seen *so far*. Most
> font-lists never get to the "pick anything" stage and typically the
> font-lists contain many fonts that have been selected but not actually
> loaded.

It appears that my plans for Xft have been anticipated by the Mozilla 
team.  That's good to hear, I like to use methods already tried in other 
environments instead of attempting to invent new ones.

> > The obvious mechanism for culling fonts from this list
> > would be to eliminate fonts which don't increase the
> > Unicode coverage over the union of
> 
> An interesting idea that would seem most beneficial for
> case where the code was at the "pick anything" stage.
> Hopefully, however, this will be the very rare
> exception not the norm.

While this may be true for X fonts in non-Unicode encodings,, I've found
the list of glyphs available in TrueType fonts to vary greatly and
randomly; there isn't any apparent rhyme or reason to what's provided.  I
think this will make the selecting job harder.

[EMAIL PROTECTED]        XFree86 Core Team      SuSE, Inc.


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