ANNOUNCEMENT AND WARNING: The classic and widely used X11 BDF bitmap font families "-misc-fixed-*", "-adobe-*", and "-b&h-*" have been extended from ISO8859-1 to ISO10646-1 (Unicode) to accommodate users of more languages and mathematical symbols under X11 and to facilitate the migration towards UTF-8. They are available on http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts-75dpi100dpi.tar.gz Most likely, XFree86 4.1 will include these "*-iso10646-1" fonts, so they will become quickly widely installed. Unfortunately, GTK+ 1.2.3 contained a bug that was triggered by the mere presence of a certain Unicode font, namely -Adobe-Helvetica-Medium-R-Normal--12-120-75-75-P-67-ISO10646-1 In gtk/gtkstyle.c, the line gdk_font_load ("-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-120-*-*-*-*-*-*"); simply picks the first font in the alphabet that matches the wildcard. With the ISO10646-1 fonts present, this will be -Adobe-Helvetica-Medium-R-Normal--12-120-75-75-P-67-ISO10646-1 instead of -Adobe-Helvetica-Medium-R-Normal--12-120-75-75-P-67-ISO8859-1 Getting an ISO10646-1 font instead of an ISO8859-1 font should normally not make a big difference to an application. The latter is just a superset of the former, it contains in the first 256 glyph positions the same Latin-1 characters as the old ISO8859-1 font and just consumes a bit more memory. Almost all X clients survive the addition of an ISO10646-1 font or even the replacement of all ISO8859-1 fonts by ISO10646-1 fonts without any problem. GTK+ 1.2.3 broke badly, because gdk/gdkfont.c contained several unfortunate code pieces that tested whether a font contained any characters > 0xff and then treated any string written out in such a font as a (Japanese, etc.) EUC coded string of 16-bit values. So if you tried to print 8-bit text with an ISO10646-1 font, all you saw were default character boxes. For this reason, XFree86 delayed the introduction of ISO10646-1 versions of the Adobe fonts by a year after I reported this GTK+ bug in 1999-08-06 to [EMAIL PROTECTED] This year is soon over. Newer versions of GTK+ (I just looked at 1.2.9) fixed this problem by explicitly specifying "*-iso8859-1" in the default font. So I hope nothing too bad will happen if XFree86 4.1 adds the new fonts soon. However there might still be numerous older GTK+ applications around for which an update or workaround will be necessary. You hereby have been warned! Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> _______________________________________________ gtk-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-list
