Re: Fonts for the backend

[Shai Ayal]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 8:29 AM, Thomas Weber
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On 25/06/08 06:21 +0300, Shai Ayal wrote:
>> While windows and OSX come with a core set of fonts that are assured
>> to be in all systems, linux has no such feature. Moreover, I am not a
>> font expert but I'm not sure the core fonts available in other systems
>> are adequate for our needs. Also, I'm not sure how to test for font
>> existence in the configure script.
>
> What type of fonts do you need? Truetype?

We use the freetype library which supports just about any font types
known to man (actually I don't think they support metafont as used in
TeX)

>> My solution in octplot was to include a set of 4 core fonts
>> (Helvetica, Times, Courier, Symbol) in the distribution
>>
>> The pros:
>> A known set of core fonts
>> the URW fonts are metric-compatible with the core postscript fonts, so
>> screen & postscript/pdf fonts look similar
>> No need to do system specific searches for fonts
>
>> The cons:
>> adds ~150K per font to the distro
> I guess I can live with that.
>
>> most linux systems probably have these fonts installed somewhere
> Distributions will strip them out, nothing to worry about[1]. People
> compiling from source are probably best of with a known good start.
>
>> maintain the fonts
> Is this so much work? I really don't have a clue, but I'd say that the
> above fonts are pretty stable, aren't they?

As far as I know they are stable, but I since my knowledge is based
on octplot which has a pretty small user-base, I'm not sure it applies
here

> [1] Not sure if that actually works that way, but if something like
> $./configure --font-path=/usr/share/fonts/truetype
> worked, that would be cool.

The thing is we need some "Standard" fonts -- serif, sans, mono and
symbol and we need to test for their existence in some
system-independent way

>        Thomas
>