Le Fri, May 11, 2001, à 10:33:27AM -0500, Lars Clausen a écrit:
> I disagree on this; I think we should get some better font support soon,
> even if it means that some documents will use replacement fonts when moved
> between machines. PostScript output can just have the font embedded.
How do you retrieve the PS fonts' outlines ? (assuming we'll let TTF aside
for the moment) ? How do you even ask the font serving service (I'm
deliberately avoiding the term "font server", for obvious reasons) for where
the file are stored, or if that service is not located on the same machine
as dia or as the display, how do you download these files ?
Yes, embedding the font right into the PS output is anyway the Right Thing
to do outside of the core font set (the one we use). And yes, understanding
fonts outside the ones we understand would probably please our non-latin
friends a lot.
Besides retrieving the outlines, there are other things to solve before we
get something useful: font matching isn't easy, charset handling and
translations have to be done (damn Adobe and its proprietary encoding(s)
(OK, damn legacy stuff)), etc.
I'm absolutely not against solving this problem in dia ; but from my very
lacunar knowledge of Pango/Gtk2 features, I've got the impression that there's some
infrastructure work there towards goals useful to dia... We already have a
lot of work to do (OK, OK, I'm not doing a lot of stuff since Easter...), in
areas the core Gtk/GNOME hackers don't necessarily grok (or have direct
interest in).
> The problem of different font installations on different machines will not
> get fixed until there is some kind of font-server available for all that
> allows the document to specify and download fonts, and I don't see that
> happening any time soon. So if we can deal with the PostScript problems,
The problem is having X understand vector fonts, and having decent protocols
for use by the display_server <-> font_server and font_server<->client
(direct or through the display_server) (latter probably better), to handle
printing. Using arbitrary fonts for just the display poses no problems, of
course.
-- Cyrille
--
Grumpf.
