I've had a request to consider how to "group" fonts as seen in Macintosh
interfaces -- that interface permits the list of available fonts to be
trimmed down to elide infrequently used fonts or to limit the display to
only a few fonts selected for a particular project.
This message is just a starting point for discussion, I want to see if I'm
going in a reasonable direction as the underlying requirements aren't all
that clear to me yet.
Here's what I'm thinking this evening:
1) Create groups of font families; each family can be in zero or more
groups. These groups are part of the global configuration (either
system-wide or per-user). These are a part of the font pattern.
2) Add a new mode for <match> elements. Currently, <match> works on
either pre-match patterns or post-match font names. Make it work
on pre-list patterns as well. This permits changing the pattern
provided to list fonts.
3) Use the group as a part of the font matching property list.
I'm not sure precisely where in the list it should fall.
Now the configuration can contain elements like:
<group name="laserwriter">
<family>times</family>
<family>courier</family>
<family>helvetica</family>
<family>symbol</family>
</group>
<match target="list">
<edit group="laserwriter">
</match>
Now font listing would show only fonts from the "laserwriter" group, while
font matching would still use all available fonts. Add:
<match target="pattern">
<edit group="laserwriter">
</match>
and now font matching would prefer fonts from the "laserwriter" group,
although, depending on the precedence of "group", it might still match
fonts outside of the group.
I'm not sure I like the notion of placing the group selection into the
global configuration, but I'm not sure where else it should go. Should
there be API support to set/query the current groups?
Keith Packard XFree86 Core Team Compaq Cambridge Research Lab
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