Two questions about fonts:
For an X application, which fonts are available? Which are recommended?
xlsfonts does not list a lot of them, and the ones listed have ugly
sounding names. (Does the latest build add more fonts? I'm downloading
it now.) Are there more fonts available to X applications that I can't
see with xlsfonts? Specifically the OLPC Human Interface Guidelines
recommends Bitstream Vera Sans, which I would like to use. What font
string can I pass to the standard old X library functions to get that
nice font, and what sizes are available?
Maybe I'm just hallucinating, but for a Cairo/Pango application (pie
menus), it seems that the size a font is rendered depends on the screen
resolution. On my laptop/vmware/fedora core/x11 development system, I
configured all the pie menu fonts so they looked nice on the 75dpi
screen. But then when I ran the same Python code on the actual OLPC's
200 dpi screen, the fonts came out way too big compared to the graphics.
So I had to reduce the point size of the font by multiplying by a factor
of 75/200 or so. But that was clumsy because Cairo font specs are
strings that look like "zapf-dingbats 64", and the point size is not a
number that's easy to scale mathematically.
It's kinda weird that the text adjust the font size for the dpi, but the
rest of the graphics don't. Is this a Pango thing or a Cairo thing?
Should I be checking the dpi and factoring that into the scale of the
graphics I draw, but not the text? (That's pretty inconvenient... Not
the way PostScript works. I'd prefer that all drawing scales according
to the screen resolution, not just fonts.) Is there a way to fake out
the dots per inch so the development machine acts like it has a 200 dpi
screen? Maybe the X configuration file? Or is there a better approach
that would enable the program to work correctly on any dpi screen,
without bending over backwards?
-Don
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