Re: fonts

[Colin Walters <walters@debian.org>]

On Mon, 2003-03-10 at 04:14, Emile van Bergen wrote:

> May I object? 

You may :)

> Fontconfig is a large, non-language neutral programmatic
> interface that would have to be universally adopted for this solution to
> work.

Well, I'm not advocating removing Defoma, just using fontconfig where
possible.

> I think a two-way approach would be best:
> 
> 1. design a common information base containing everything you'd ever want 
>    an application to know about the list of available fonts on a system;

Hmmm.  How do you see this being done?

> 2. retain a push-mechanism so that old applications can be notified of
>    changes in relevant parts of this font information base;

Ok.

> 3. encourage new applications to use this information base directly,
>    possibly through a simple library, but ideally it should be simple
>    enough for non-expert programmers to access directly.

I don't think fontconfig's API is that hard...but OK.

> Of course, this could all be done with fontconfig as the common part,
> but I'd be /much/ happier with a simple directory tree that provides a
> few indexes through symlinks. 

I think it makes more sense to use fontconfig.

> Parts of defoma could be kept to notify old applications of changes and
> convert the tree into whatever application-specific format, and new ones
> can use the trees directly. Ghostscript could get a patch so it could
> use the 'bypsname' directory in addition to its Fontmap files.

I think we'll have to keep Defoma for some time.

> I'm not claiming this as an do-all, end-all solution; I haven't even
> fully thought this out, and there may be much better schemes than
> byfamily and bypsname, but I hope you'll consider something /simple/ and
> language-neutral like this before you require each application to adopt
> fontconfig in order to become aware of fonts installed by dpkg.

Ok, but this is a grander goal than what I wanted, which was just for
font packages to rerun fc-cache.