Re: Why dose art not use fontconfig?

[Isaiah Beerbower]

On 8/22/07, Jeff Teunissen <spamtrap@d2dc.net> wrote:
> Isaiah Beerbower wrote:
> > On 8/21/07, Jeff Teunissen <spamtrap@d2dc.net> wrote:
>
> ...
>
> > I can see how it wouldn't be desirable to have GNUstep use every font
> > found by fontconfig. Fontconfig and FreeType can provide us with all
> > the information we need. IMHO nfonts are a pain to *have* to use (as
> > an option it would be fine). I want to download a font and be able to
> > install it as is.
>
> As I said, it's a nice, fast, simple system that should have been
> better-supported but wasn't because I didn't want to have to do it. ;)
>
> I'm perfectly happy to contribute to a New Font database, I just didn't want
> to have to run the damn thing. I have quite a few hand-crafted nfonts that
> could be distributed, and even more that couldn't be (because the fonts
> themselves can't be -- about a third of the Adobe OpenType font library), but
> which could easily be put into a database somewhere for people to download and
> assemble with their own font collections -- perhaps using a program like Font
> Manager. You open up "Font Manager", tell it "Package this group of TTFs", it
> calls out to a site and grabs the FontInfo plist, and chunks the whole thing
> into an nfont which it then drops into your Fonts library and tells all the
> running programs to rescan the font dirs.

The fact that you would have to go to a special font database is part
of the annoyance. I want users to download fonts from the authors site
and just install them.

HOWEVER

For Font Manager, I had plans of using fontconfig and FreeType to
generate nfonts without any user, or other, input (other than, of
course, the font files).

> Backbone in CVS has a few free nfonts that use hand-crafted info plists (the
> DejaVu font set, covering most stuff that's not CJK); you're welcome to use
> them in anything else, under GPL.

Étoilé also has a default fonts package which contains the DejaVu
fonts plus many others.

> > In short, I think if we had our own font searching, and used
> > fontconfig for getting information from fonts, we would have added
> > convenience without sacrificing anything (again IMHO) important.
>
> Fontconfig is only useful for getting the basic font information; its main
> purpose is to do the searching. To get the extra info *step needs requires
> using FreeType on the font files.

-- 
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