Bastian, Waldo wrote:
The OSDL DTL Technical Board is organizing a number of conference calls
on topics that, the tech board believes, are affecting Desktop Linux
adoption. This week's agenda topic is dedicated to Font support on
Linux.
OSDL DTL organized the second OSDL Desktop Architects Meeting (DAM)
earlier this year and the availability and support of high quality fonts
in emerging markets (e.g. Asia) as well as document fidelity between
different Linux distributions were identified as font-related issues
that could be improved.
We hereby want to invite interested people to this weeks DTL Tech Board
Call to talk about current efforts around fonts, licensing, etc.
Goal for the call is to improve the understanding of font issues as they
exist in current generation Linux Desktop systems, inform people about
current initiatives related to fonts and, if possible, mobilize
individual contributors, OSDL and other corporate resources to help
these efforts along.
In case I don't get to discuss this on the call, my main problem with
fonts on Linux is that some apps don't work correctly with fonts.
I have (for example) these Helvetica Type1 fonts installed:
PS Font Name PFB File
Helvetica-Condensed-Light hvcl____.pfb
Helvetica-Condensed-LightObl hvclo___.pfb
Helvetica-Condensed hvc_____.pfb
Helvetica-Condensed-Oblique hvcdo___.pfb
Helvetica-Condensed-Bold hvcb____.pfb
Helvetica-Condensed-BoldObl hvcbo___.pfb
Helvetica-Narrow hvn_____.pfb
Helvetica-Narrow-Oblique hvno____.pfb
Helvetica-Narrow-Bold hvnb____.pfb
Helvetica-Narrow-BoldOblique hvnbo___.pfb
Helvetica-Light hvl_____.pfb
Helvetica-LightOblique hvlo____.pfb
Helvetica hv______.pfb
Helvetica-Oblique hvo_____.pfb
Helvetica-Bold hvb_____.pfb
Helvetica-BoldOblique hvbo____.pfb
HelveticaRounded-BoldCond hebc____.pfb
HelveticaRounded-BoldCondObl hebco___.pfb
HelveticaRounded-Bold heb_____.pfb
HelveticaRounded-BoldObl hebo____.pfb
HelveticaRounded-Black hebl____.pfb
HelveticaRounded-BlackObl heblo___.pfb
The old X system has them listed correctly. FontConfig has them listed
correctly.
KDE manages to find 6 of the Helvetica and 4 of the Helvetica Rounded.
Perhaps the fault lines in Qt.
OpenOffice manages to find 6 of Helvetica but they aren't the same 6.
KDE is better since at least it has the standard 4 faces (regular,
oblique, bold, bold-oblique), but OO seems unable to find regular and
oblique. It finds 4 of Helvetica Rounded but (again) not the same ones
and bold-oblique isn't there. If I had paid full price for these
rather than getting them secondhand, I would not be happy about this. :-)
GNOME does better in this example since if finds all of them. I suppose
that it probably makes some errors on more obscure fonts and I haven't
checked every font lately. However, I do have a complaint with GNOME,
the font chooser doesn't list the fonts in a logical order if they are
Type1.
The other issue which does seem to be an issue with X and FontConfig is
that the fonts are handled differently depending on whether they are
Type1 or TrueType. For example: Helvetica Narrow Bold. With Type1, the
family is: "Helvetica", but with TrueType the family is: "Helvetica
Narrow". This issue starts with the way the font name is formatted in
the font file. However, this does not provide a consistent (or good)
user interface -- 16 faces in a jumbled order is not good (and there are
more kinds of Helvetica available). The dialogs seems to be designed
for the TrueType system so it would probably be better to convert the
Type1 font names to the TrueType font name schema.
--
JRT
_______________________________________________
xdg mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
