Re: Debian font registry?
Branden Robinson <branden@ecn.purdue.edu> writes:
> [passing this mail along to debian-x in case anyone there knows anything
> 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.
OK, this almost certainly was what the person was describing.
He made it sound like you were autogenerating the fonts.* files,
out of some other format, but it was reasonably close to the
above.
As a side note, the way that Red Hat handles the above problem
is that we install each set of fonts in a separate directory,
always runs a font server, and then have a 'chkfontpath' script
that takes care of appropriately modifying the font server's font
path and notifying the font server to reread its configuration
files. So, another case of pointless inter-distribution
incompatibility, though this one should be invisible to apps.
But I don't handle the X packages for Red Hat; I'm really
interested in a couple of different questions.
- How does a user specify a font without becoming an expert
in X. This is already an issue normally, but becomes a big
issue when i18n comes into the picture. Because if you
are rendering internationalized text, 'Helvectica' doesn't
map to a single XLFD but to a set of XLFDs. (fontset)
- How does an application that wants to use Postscript (or TrueType)
fonts directly figure out the mapping between those fonts
and the fonts on the X server.
With the first question being the more immediate issue I'm
trying to deal with.
> 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.
Certainly. (Though the performance of xlsfonts equivalents is actually
a fairly big bottleneck in a lot of cases.)
> 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).
In essence, these are the two problems I've been thinking about.
Once I figure out a bit more about how I think handling
user-manageable names for fonts/fontsets should be managed,
I'll write up a proposal and send it around to the relevant
fora.
Owen
Reply to: