Re: Latin2 default font

[Fred Kiefer]

Hi Marko,

you are right the current implementation of the font handling in GNUstep
will only work well for 8 bit fonts. But this should not be any problem
for you as latin2 is also a 8 bit encoding.
As far as I know the GNUSTEP_STRING_ENCODING environment variable is not
used for anything concerning fonts (It better should be used while
determining the best creation string for a font). The whole part of font
caching should be rewritten to better use the information provided by
the X-server.

I think that your problem is that you did not recreate the font cache
after you changed your font path. (This has to be done manually by
deleting the file  ~/GNUstep/Library/Fonts/Cache/0: where the display
name may be different for your machine) This would explain why the
fallback font fixed is used.

As for the multibyte glyph drawing the problem is not to add the code in
the XGFontInfo class (for this we would just store the encoding in an
ivar and use the correct function in the drawing and string length
method. What is missing is that the front-end hands on 8 bit strings to
the back end code for drawing (This is now local to the
NSStringDrawing.m file) so any 16 information is already lost before the
NSFont object gets involved. I think it is possible to change this as a
quick hack, but for a general solution we will have to generate glyphs
that are suitable for the font and hand them on to the back end.

I hope this helps and explains a bit of the background. If you are
interested in taking over any part of the font improvement I am willing
to share any advise I can provide.

Fred

PS: I read in another mail that you are a "Self" fan. How is that status
of the Linux port of this language? I used to play around with Self
myself, almost ten years ago now.