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Re: gtk, fonts, locales



On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 09:14:52AM +0100, Jules Bean wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 07:42:48PM -0400, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > For starts, I'm working on trying to fix the Ugly Font Syndrome that
> > people complain about in Debian.  I recently got bit by this problem
> > after a dist-upgrade on Sid.
> 
> You probably have some old X component lying around.  Either an old X
> server, or an old X font server.  New versions have a work-around for
> this bug (see below).

Yes, I was told so.  I am running 4.1.0-8, and seem to have removed all
other evil components (that I know of).

> 
> > First, the locale for users doesn't seem to be set properly.  THe locale
> > was C, even though it should have been en_US (iso8859-1).  I found a
> 
> Well, C is presumably the default.

Which is kinda bad, I would think.  Perhaps I am mistaken on that one?

> 
> > Finally, there is a bug in gtkhtml and it's default font selection. 
> > Even with my locale set, it defaults to the iso10646 fontset.  This is a
> > known bug in gtkhtml, and not necessary debian's responsibility to fix. 
> > However, I am curious as to why I have an iso10646 fontset.  It
> > definitely isn't a fontset I want, and don't use.  Why is it installed? 
> 
> It should be a fontset you want.  And you should use it.  Unless you
> would rather not see the names of your email correspondents correctly
> rendered, or people's names on webpages, or occasional snippets of
> foreign languages. It's the way forward.

OK  I'm not understanding then what iso10646 does?  Why it is needed
over iso8859-1?  It supports a larger character set?

> 
> However, old applications expecting 8-bit encodings will break when
> they're unexpectedly given a 16-bit encoding.  For this reason, the X
> server and the X font server have been hacked to return iso8859 before 
> iso10646 when no font-set is requested specifically.

Yes, well, there are bugs in GTKHtml I am told that does the exact
opposite.

> 
> 
> > Should there perhaps be a different set of X font package for the
> > differnt locales (or at least geographic/cultural/linguistic regions) ? 
> > I know that could get big, but I'm guessing thee is a big waste in disk
> > and download space for these?  Or is the memory usage not that high for
> > each locale?
> 
> There are different sets.
> 
> But iso10646 is something we should all be using.

Ah, OK, Got it.

> 
> As to the font size problem: perhaps you have the 100dpi fonts
> installed and you'd prefer the 75dpi fonts?  They're "bigger".

Hmm, I was under the understanding that I could only use one or the
other, and that my setup would require the 100dpi?

> 
> Jules

Thanks for clarifications.  ^,^  I think I should stop working on that
kind of stuff that ltae at night.

Sean Etc.



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