Hi,
Jeff Trefftzs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> For some time now, on both 1.2.x and 1.3.x, I have noticed some
> curiosities about the GIMP's font handling. I have downloaded and
> installed a number of true-type fonts, most of which work fine, as long
> as I run xfstt to serve them up, but a few of these fonts behave
> differently depending on which tool I use to view them.
>
> In particular, using GIMP-1.2.5, the text tool by itself fails to show
> any characters for several of my fonts, meaning I can't use them,
> although the Freetype tool, while still not letting me use any of the
> characters, will at least show them in the character grid.
The freetype plug-in uses a completely different architecture to
handle fonts. It's not surprising that it behaves differently as X11
font rendering (which is what the text tool in 1.2 uses).
> In GIMP-1.3.15, I have similar problems, but now that I'm running
> RH-9 (a Gnome-2 system), I find that Nautilus can display *all* of
> my fonts, at least to the point of popping up the gnome-font-viewer
> when I click on the font file in Nautilus. What are the plans to
> unify font handling? I realize this is a horribly hairy problem.
For 1.3 the font handling has been unified to the best extent.
Nautilus displays the fonts on screen, so it uses the Pango Xft2
backend, while GIMP needs to render bitmaps and uses the Pango FT2
backend. Both backends do however use the same code to manage fonts
and they do share the same configuration files. So basically you
should be able to use the same fonts and you should get very similar
results.
There is one exception and that is fonts that do not provide an
Unicode character table. Fonts that fail to do that can be considered
broken. The Xft2 backend seems to be able to handle some of these
fonts by creating an Unicode table from other info in the font. The
Pango FT2 backend however fails to load these broken fonts. This
probably needs to be improved at the Pango level.
Sven
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