Re: ANN: back-art resources 0.1.1

[Kazunobu Kuriyama]

Adam Fedor wrote:

> On Wednesday, July 9, 2003, at 09:51 AM, Alexander Malmberg wrote:
>
> > http://w1.423.telia.com/~u42308495/alex/backart/ArtResources- 
> > 0.1.1.tar.bz2
> > (1.4mb)
> >
> > Feedback is appreciated.
> >
> > Issues:
> >
> > Where should this package be? It would be good to have it as close to
> > -back as possible, but it's probably too big to have it in -back
> > (uncompressed, Free* is 2.5mb, Vera* 0.5mb).
> We could put it in core, but perhaps rename it to something like  
> BackResources or SystemResources to make it more general
>
>
> > makes sense for -xlib, but not for other backends. It would make more
> > sense for this code to ask the backend for the default fonts. This way,
> > font fallback (in order to find _any_ font usable as the system font)
> > can be handled in the backend, which can do better than trying random
> > names.
> Sounds like a good idea. 

Yes, indeed.  

It also makes sense in view of i18n; in some language environments,
Helvetica/Courier doesn't make sense or is too restrictive to display
all the characters they need, although it is reasonable as a 
default/fallback
value.

It would also be nice for non-European users if GNUstep allows them to 
specify
multiple system fonts, one for displaying the Latin characters, and the 
rest for
the characters of their native language. (I'm not sure if this makes 
sense for the
backends other than -xlib.)

For this purpose and to minimize possible developers' labor, it may be 
useful to
introduce the notion of 'supplementary system fonts' to save the current 
interface
and implementation as possible.  

When supplementary system fonts are not specified, GNUstep would behave 
as it does,
while once they are specified, GNUstep could display non-Latin 
characters based on
a given specification. It would be possible for the backend to specify 
by itself
supplementary system fonts based on a locale in use unless any 
specification is
given.

Oops, I begin to talk about another story, don't I?   Go back to the 
original
issue, please.

- KK