[passing this mail along to debian-x in case anyone there knows anything about it] On Thu, Oct 21, 1999 at 03:25:43PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote: > I had a quick question that you probably know the answer > to if it exists. (it is a pretty vague question) > > Someone I was talking to recently (I have know idea who > at this point...) mentioned that someone in the Debian > project had created a standard for installing scaleable > fonts in a common location, and creating a text database > of those fonts. > > Now, I had not heard of such a thing myself, and I can't > find any reference to such a thing. But since it seems > relevant to some of the work I am doing with GTK+, > internationalization and fonts, I thought I'd try a > little harder to dig up a reference. This sounds like it *might* be a misinterpretation of some infrastructure I've developed that makes it so packages that provide fonts for X don't ship fonts.alias or fonts.scale files in the font directories, but instead places them in /etc. The package post-installation script then calls some tools that cat these together into the X font directory. That way you can have multiple packages installing fonts into the same directory without them stepping on each other's alias or LFD info. Hence, no editing of the FontPath in /etc/X11/XF86Config or stuff like that. If you're curious about the implementation details, you can check out recent versions of the Debian xbase-clients package, and see the manpages for update-fonts-alias and update-fonts-scale. For example font packages, try xfonts-scalable, xfonts-base, and xfonts-cjk. What kind of text database were you thinking of? If it's just a list of LFD names then the fonts will be served through a font server (be it internal or external to the X server) and you can either use programs like xlsfonts or Xlib calls to accomplish the same thing. On the other hand, there has been some discussion in Debian of late about the need for a standardized repository for multipurpose fonts (such as TrueType, which have practical application beyond the X server and in fact aren't supported by the stock XFree86 distribution yet). But I was going to wait and see if XFree86 themselves had any insight on this. If it's used by X, though, any font has a LFD registry name. It could be a useful project to come up with a way of generating less cumbersome font names for human consumption, but this should be done in a logical way, standardized across distributions, and have the input of some font gurus from XFree86 (probably some Metafont and PostScript hackers as well). I'd be happy to work with you on coming up with a solution that could be standardized on across distributions, but first I need to know exactly what the problem is. :) -- G. Branden Robinson | Software engineering: that part of Debian GNU/Linux | computer science which is too difficult branden@ecn.purdue.edu | for the computer scientist. cartoon.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |
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