http://behdad.org/text/ describes the current state of text & font handling
in the open source desktop world and work being done in various quarters to
improve it.
One of the projects mentioned is:
Automatic font installation: Building on top of the previous
feature, this feature involves automatic detection of missing fonts,
and installing them. Minimal changes in the text stack were
required. The main changes were in RPM and PackageKit. The way this
works is:
1. When building packages, RPM detects fonts,
2. For each font, RPM uses fontconfig's new fc-query tool and
FcPatternFormat() to build a list of "Provides" tags for the
list. For example, the Deja Vu Sans font will "provide" the tags
"font(:lang=en)" as well as "font(dejavusans)" among others,
3. packagekit-gnome installs a system-wide GTK+ module to be loaded
by all GTK+ applications,
4. The PackageKit GTK+ module overrides the default Pango fontmap
such that when a font is requested but not found, a message is send
to the PackageKit daemon,
5. Upon receiving such messages, the PackageKit daemon searches the
package database for the requested font tag, and shows a dialog
asking user for permission, and showing a list of font packages
available that fulfill the request,
6. When the new font is installed, running applications pick it up
automatically, no need to message them back.
Should we be doing something similar for the OpenSolaris desktop using IPS?
(fc-query is in the version of fontconfig we ship, but is missing from our
packages - I'll fix that.)
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
