Re: LibreOffice Fonts

[Maxim Cournoyer]

ng0 <address@hidden> writes:

> Ludovic Courtès transcribed 1.8K bytes:
>> Hello Tom,
>> 
>> Tom Balzer <address@hidden> skribis:
>> 
>> > Recently I installed libreoffice in my user profile, and found that all
>> > menus require the package 'font-gnu-freetype-ttf' in order to render
>> > correctly. Without this package, every character was rendered as a
>> > rectangle indicating a missing font.
>> 
>> Every character in the body of the text, or every character in the UI?
>> 
>> > From the manuals description of 'propagated-inputs', it seems like
>> > this font package would fit the use case:
>> >
>> >> Lastly, ‘propagated-inputs’ is similar to ‘inputs’, but the
>> >> specified packages will be automatically installed alongside
>> >> the package they belong to (*note ‘guix package’:
>> >> package-cmd-propagated-inputs, for information on how ‘guix
>> >> package’ deals with propagated inputs.)
>> >> 
>> >> For example this is necessary when a C/C++ library needs
>> >> headers of another library to compile, or when a pkg-config
>> >> file refers to another one via its ‘Requires’ field.
>> >
>> > I asked on #guix, and one argument against including fonts in propagated
>> > inputs is to avoid packaging the font when 'pack'ing for another
>> > system. This to me is really an argument for including the fonts, since
>> > there is no guarantee that the other system is 'rational', so to
>> > speak. To create totally portable packages I would think including this
>> > font required to render the menus would make sense.
>> 
>> I think it’s a borderline case.  In a sense, the font is additional
>> material used as input by LO (and indeed LO is much less useful without
>> it, but it’s still LO), though I can also understand the other argument.
>> 
>> My current inclination would be the status quo.  Otherwise we’d have to
>> worry about fonts and artwork for Abiword, Inkscape, etc. as well.
>> 
>> Thoughts?
>> 
>> Ludo’.
>> 
>> 
>
> What about an fontcache-service that basically
> is mcron running daily "fc-cache -f"
> or even "fc-cache -fr"?

Is there no way to provide it the way it should, i.e. as a
profile hook? I understand the issue that the cache generated would be
read-only, but that cache would be in the system and users running
fc-cache themselves would produce cache in their $HOME, so I don't
immediately see an issue there (other than I haven't had time yet to
look into it -- it's on my TODO).

Maxim