Re: [XForms] Font issues

[Magnotta, Vincent A]

Jens and Oskar,

This is just a guess, but I would bet that this is related to the
transition from X11 to MIR in same flavors of Linux. I have not done
extensive exploration of this, but I did notice that recent versions of
Ubuntu lack fonts that had previously been installed with the
distribution. The appropriate font packages can still be installed and
readily be installed using your favorite package management.

I would suggest that the project that Oskar is working on be packaged
using a package manager and require that font packages. This would be in
the spirit of Linux and would handle the installation of the fonts and not
require Xforms to package and distribute fonts. Just my 2 cents worth.

Vince

--
Associate ProfessorDepartment of Radiology
0453-D JCP
200 Hawkins Drive
Iowa City, IA 52242
E-mail: address@hidden
Phone: 319-356-8255 Fax: 319-353-6275
Website: http://www.healthcare.uiowa.edu/Radiology





On 5/28/14 6:50 PM, "address@hidden" <address@hidden> wrote:

>Hi Jens,
>     thanks for your kind words. There are actually several application
>available on Sourceforge, which I built using Xforms: Lxoskope,Lxascope,
>Lxardoscope, Lxiggen and Lxsndtest, some of them waiting for an upgrade
>after this font issue is laid to rest. And yes, you can use any of the
>screenshots for your advertisement.
>Regarding the "spirit of Linux", my concern is that Helvetica is a
>proprietary font owned by Linotype. What we get in xfonts-100dpi is
>probably an illegal knockoff, thus not really free. I guess this is the
>reason it is
>not installed in recent Ubunto distros and derivatives (like Mint).
>Arial is another knockoff; I think we should not use Microsoft or Apple
>proprietary fonts, and we should not ask the users to rip these fonts
>from commercial software installations.
>My understanding of what is happening behind the scenes is extremely
>limited. There seem to be two systems for dealing with fonts, Xforms is
>using the older one. Maybe by renaming an existing, decent looking, free
>font to something like xforms-font we can avoid issues with name clashes.
>Hopefully somebody else in the xforms community has some good ideas how
>to deal with this issue...
>Regards
>       Oskar
>
>
>
>On 05/28/2014 09:00 AM, address@hidden wrote:
>> Send xforms-development mailing list submissions to
>>      address@hidden
>>
>> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
>>      https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/xforms-development
>> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
>>      address@hidden
>>
>> You can reach the person managing the list at
>>      address@hidden
>>
>> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
>> than "Re: Contents of xforms-development digest..."
>>
>>
>> Today's Topics:
>>
>>     1. Re: Font issues (Jens Thoms Toerring)
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Tue, 27 May 2014 21:29:30 +0200
>> From: Jens Thoms Toerring <address@hidden>
>> To: Development with and of XForms <address@hidden>
>> Subject: Re: [XForms] Font issues
>> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>>
>> Hi Oskar,
>>
>> On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 07:49:40PM -0700, address@hidden wrote:
>>>       after upgrading from Mint9 to Mint13, I noticed that fontsize
>>> and fontstyle in my GUIs were ignored. Finally I took some time to
>>> get to the bottom of the problem. My observations:
>>> 1. Mint9 has the Xforms default font Helvetica installed, whereas it
>>> is missing in Mint 13.
>> Oh, that's not good! Helvetica was a bitmap font that was
>> always available until now, as far as I know;-)
>>
>>> 2. When the default font is missing, another one is substituted
>>> (which one? by xforms? by X11?)
>> That's a bit of a mixture. The requested fonts are as "loosely"
>> specified as possible, e.g., for normal Helvetica the library
>> asks for
>>
>> "-*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-*-?-*-*-p-*-*-*"
>>
>> with just the '?' replaced by the size. So X11 has a lot of
>> leeway in selecting something. If Xlib still can't find any-
>> thing fitting XForms switches to "emergency mode" and tries
>> to use an already loaded font font with the nearest size to
>> what the caller requested. And if even that fails it finally
>> tries the rather ugly "fixed" and "6x13" fonts, which should
>> always available.
>>
>>> 3. The fonts available to Xforms can be found using the xlsfonts
>>> command or the xfontsel graphic utility.
>>> 4. The Xforms demo fonts.c can be used to view the different fonts
>>> with different sizes.
>>> 5. Some of the fonts do not scale properly (for example 10 and 12
>>> are same size, 11 smaller than 10).
>> I guess that's some effect of using more or less randomly
>> picked replacement fonts when the requestd font isn't avai-
>> lable. But I haven't experienced that yet, on all machines
>> I've used the default fonts of XForms existed. Could be that
>> this is because I tend to install a lot of fonts when setting
>> up a new machine;-)
>>
>>> 6. I can install xfonts-100dpi, which contains the Helvetica font.
>>> However this is really against the spirit of Linux; I guess that's
>>> why the font was removed in later versions of the Mint distro.
>> What do you consider to be against the "spirit of Linux"? As far
>> as I can tell I've never seen a machine with X11, be it Linux or
>> other types of UNIX, that hadn't had a 100dpi (and 75dpi) font
>> directory (some without too many others;-). My silent assump-
>> tion until today has been that these are an integral part of
>> an X11 installation. My Xlib programming manual lists '100dpi',
>> '75dpi' and 'misc' as *the* directories where fonts are to be
>> found (ok, the precise location has changed a bit over the
>> years). So I would consider it a mistake by Mint to not in-
>> stall these fonts by default - who knows how many programs
>> they're breaking for saving a measly 13MB?
>>
>>> Here comes my question: would it be possible to include a free
>>> default font with Xforms, such that GUIs look the same on all
>>> distros? Some designers spend a lot of time arranging the widgets to
>>> produce something nice, but if the particular font is missing, then
>>> this effort can be wasted, and the GUI may look terrible. Any other
>>> ideas how to deal with font issues?
>> I can fully understand your point if view when I see how nice
>> your Lxardoscope looks like (for those not having seen it have
>> a look at <http://www.elecfreaks.com/2042.html>). As an aside,
>> would you allow me to use it for the screenshot page on
>> <http://xforms-toolkit.org>?
>>
>> What I would be most concerned about here is that I have no good
>> idea what the consequences of something like that would be. As far
>> as I can see We would have to do at least
>>
>> a) copy the fonts to some place, perhaps /usr/local/fonts/XForms?
>> b) modify the font path. Were do I set it? It could be in lots
>>     of different places and I have no idea of any reliable way to
>>     find it out. 'xset +fb path' won't do since, as far as I know,
>>     it stays only that way for the duration of an Xsession. I'm also
>>     not sure if modifying the font path behind the users back is the
>>     right thing to do...
>> c) run font configure, i.e., 'fc-cache -f'. But do all systems do
>>     it that way?
>>
>> As you can see this seems to me to be rather complicatd to do cor-
>> rectly for all possible systems. I'm also not convinced that it's
>> fitting for a library that just uses fonts to mess around with the
>> font settings, which could affect other applications unless done
>> 100% right.
>>
>> I would tend to prefer to restrict XForms to clearly mention in the
>> documentation that some additional font packages might be required
>> and perhaps try to convince distributors to automatically install
>> them with XForms (I've got to find out if this can be done via some
>> entries in the libforms.spec file).
>>
>> What do you think?
>>                                 Best regards, Jens
>
>



________________________________
Notice: This UI Health Care e-mail (including attachments) is covered by the 
Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. 2510-2521, is confidential and 
may be legally privileged.  If you are not the intended recipient, you are 
hereby notified that any retention, dissemination, distribution, or copying of 
this communication is strictly prohibited.  Please reply to the sender that you 
have received the message in error, then delete it.  Thank you.
________________________________