Re: Debian Font Guide for Newbies and the Confused
On Mon, Oct 13, 2003 at 08:53:22PM -0700, M. Kirchhoff wrote:
> As an addition, note that this guide will cover only the X core font system.
> AFAIK (and correct me if I'm wrong), fontconfig is not available under Stable,
> which rules out a discussion of Xft at this time...
>
> I'm pledging to keep the guide up-to-date, so at some point it will cover the
> transition from the core system to the Xft rendering system...
>
> -M.
>
>
A font guide for Debian would be very useful; there seem to be few if
any people who think they have a real handle on what's going on, at
least in its entirety.
I posted some discoveries I made to debian-user and debian-kde about a
couple of months ago, and there was some good discussion in those
threads.
Personally, I think restricting the focus to stable, or just certain
aspects of it, is a bit limiting, but it's your call. My impression
is that a lot of the confusion comes from the sheer number of
different mechanisms, so you need to discuss all of them to really
orient people. Font handling is also a fairly rapidly changing target, and
today's testing is tomorrow's stable (well, maybe next year's!).
The owner of fontconfig has provided some additional
clarification/explanation of the relation between some of the font
handling mechanisms in Debian in the latest package; I haven't seen it
yet, but it's likely illuminating (it was in response to a request of
mine to say more about the relation between fontconfig, defoma, XFree,
and other font options).
I also encourage you to feed what you find to the authors of the
other, non-Debian, FAQs.
Thanks for taking this on.
P.S. I get the feeling that's not a real email address in your return,
but I'll try it anyway.
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