Re: Fonts working "out of the box"
After I started this thread I found some good documentation on how X fonts
works. This lead me to read the Render mailing list at Xfree86.org. There
was a very interesting thread between Keith Packard, who is working on the
rendering extension and the Xft library, and Brian Stell from Netscape. They
were discussing mainly antialiasing and the needs mozilla has for fonts. In
short, it looks like Xft and its configuration file XftConfig will turn out
to be the "core place" were X fonts can be configured in the future. Both Qt
and soon Gtk will work with it, Mozilla will not at the moment but probably
when Xft is stable.
People may or may not like antialiasing, but the fact is that Xft gives the
user great control over how they want their fonts rendered and configured.
As I understand it, antialiasing can be completely turned off, but Xft can
still render the fonts. At the moment XftConfig has a peculiar syntax, and
it is hard to update it with tools, like from some kind of gui. One concern
is that the font paths has to be added to it as well as to XF86Config, and
this is unfortunate because it is easy to miss. However, it might turn out
that XftConfig can "include" a font list from some other file, and then for
example Debian policy can demand that this other file must be updated when
font packages are installed.
I also think that font aliases can be defined. Then we can say that debian
applications must use the aliases "serif" or sans-serif" (just examples),
with the best defaults Debian can distribute, and then the user can with
some tool change exactly what fonts will be used with these aliases. But
more likely is perhaps the KDE/Gnome folks will create some policies on
their own, and then this will not be so much a matter for Debian.
And it might even turn out to be better than this. There is also demand for
unified X and printing font management. Keith had a vision of three
libraries:
An X specific rendering library (Xft)
A printing specific rendering library (PSft?)
A shared library for font matching and configuration (ftconfig?)
Perhaps this will never be achieved, but font handling in X looks less
confusing to me now. I can recommend this thread as well as the Xfree86 font
faq.
So, at the moment I think it is a little to early to enhance the Debian
"font policy" and management, but as soon there is a version of X that has
the enhanced XftConfig syntax, I think it can and should be done.
Claes
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