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Re: Fonts for the backend


From: Jaroslav Hajek
Subject: Re: Fonts for the backend
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:27:53 +0200

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 9:08 AM, Shai Ayal <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 8:29 AM, Thomas Weber
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On 25/06/08 06:21 +0300, Shai Ayal wrote:
>>> While windows and OSX come with a core set of fonts that are assured
>>> to be in all systems, linux has no such feature. Moreover, I am not a
>>> font expert but I'm not sure the core fonts available in other systems
>>> are adequate for our needs. Also, I'm not sure how to test for font
>>> existence in the configure script.
>>
>> What type of fonts do you need? Truetype?
>
> We use the freetype library which supports just about any font types
> known to man (actually I don't think they support metafont as used in
> TeX)
>
>>> My solution in octplot was to include a set of 4 core fonts
>>> (Helvetica, Times, Courier, Symbol) in the distribution
>>>
>>> The pros:
>>> A known set of core fonts
>>> the URW fonts are metric-compatible with the core postscript fonts, so
>>> screen & postscript/pdf fonts look similar
>>> No need to do system specific searches for fonts
>>
>>> The cons:
>>> adds ~150K per font to the distro
>> I guess I can live with that.
>>
>>> most linux systems probably have these fonts installed somewhere
>> Distributions will strip them out, nothing to worry about[1]. People
>> compiling from source are probably best of with a known good start.
>>
>>> maintain the fonts
>> Is this so much work? I really don't have a clue, but I'd say that the
>> above fonts are pretty stable, aren't they?
>
> As far as I know they are stable, but I since my knowledge is based
> on octplot which has a pretty small user-base, I'm not sure it applies
> here
>
>> [1] Not sure if that actually works that way, but if something like
>> $./configure --font-path=/usr/share/fonts/truetype
>> worked, that would be cool.
>
> The thing is we need some "Standard" fonts -- serif, sans, mono and
> symbol and we need to test for their existence in some
> system-independent way
>
>>        Thomas
>>
>

I think this is another area where a "download on demand" strategy
could work well.
The idea is setting up a web repository for Octave from which the
configure script would be able to download (using wget or something
equivalent) anything that is not found on the host system, such as
libraries, programs, or fonts in this case.
The idea is taken from FreeFEM++ where it is *really* convenient,
provided you have wget and internet connection: you just do
"./configure --enable-download ; make" and it works like a charm.


-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz


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