"Nicolas Mailhot" <[email protected]> writes: >> I don't think fontconfig will solve the problem on its own. I think the >> application will actually have to do the job of switching between fonts, >> but fontconfig can provide some information to help the application do a >> better job. > > fonctonfig provides the info for higher level libs (pango, harfbuzz) to do the > switching. An app should never implement a switching logic directly (that > confuses users when different app make different switching decisions instead > of relying on system libraries)
That's a nice theory, but not very useful for applications that had their text layout and rendering engines written before pango/harfbuzz became universally available "system libraries". Seriously though, I think this is a good plan. Doing font switching, glyph shaping etc. correctly is a major pain and tends to involve user configuration anyway. Getting all of that done by a system library would be great. But there are some obstacles. First of all, the API of such a system library must provide the functionality needed by the applications in such a way that the applications can effectively make use of it. Maybe pango/harfbuzz does that. I don't know, I haven't had the time to look into it yet. And even if that is true, I expect rewriting applications to make use of this API is a non-trivial amount of work. And if the application will also support systems that may not have pango/harfbuzz available, the application will still have to carry its own implementation around as well. But yes, I seriously look forward to the day we start using a system library for this. eirik _______________________________________________ [email protected]: X.Org support Archives: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg Info: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg Your subscription address: [email protected]
