Re: the art backend and font

[JONATHAN ANDREW GAPEN]

From: discuss-gnustep-request@gnu.org
Date: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 5:39 am
Subject: Discuss-gnustep digest, Vol 1 #1063 - 6 msgs

> Message: 2
> From: Derek Zhou <dzhou@chrontel.com>
> Reply-To: dzhou@chrontel.com
> Organization: chrontel
> To: discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
> Subject: the art backend and font
> Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 11:56:28 -0800
> 
> My beef about gnustep was the way it handle fonts and text. The 
> xlib backend 
> cannot use all the fonts that I have, and try to use some fonts 
> that I 
> actually don't have, and no AA. etc. Now we have this promising 
> art backend, 
> but then I am required to hack up an nfont package for each of my 
> fonts, and 
> put them under the GNUstep directory? Why can't we just behave 
> like everybody 
> else (KDE2, GNOME2), and use whatever provided by X? Being 100% 
> OPENSTEP 
> compatible is pointless, I'd rather have something usable sooner.  

     Well, there's now the FontConfig (http://www.fontconfig.org/) package, 
which lots of other user environments and applications are beginning to 
support.  I've looked at building support for it into the X backend, because 
it'll interoperate with those other environments better, handle the font 
caching, allow dynamic addition of fonts, and handle font substitutions for 
filling in Unicode ranges.
     I don't have time right now, but maybe in a few weeks...