I was just searching for free fonts, and rediscovered a site I've been on before: http://www.larabiefonts.com
After perusing the license, something stood out at me: ------ Font installation in Windows: Unzip the font using a program such as Winzip then drag & drop the font into your font folder (usually c:\windows\fonts) ------ That is pretty darned simple, and we all know windows is pretty simple with these sort of things, and more or less always has been. With the recent discussion of font servers, X server serving fonts, and also Xft, and the various configuration files fot each, as well as the various fonts.scale, fonts.dir, encodings, etc.. files that are needed in XFree86 for fonts to function, I wonder if there is a simpler way to do all of this that can result in something closer to windows "drop in and forget" way of doing things. Now please understand, I am asking only out of pure ignorance of these issues, and not in any way as a techical challenge to anyone. My interest is to explore how we all might make the entire "font experience" more pleasureable to users, and also more automated. Here are some things I have thought about while pondering why this isn't all handled more as it is in Windows: mkfontdir, fonts.dir, fonts.alias, fonts.scale, ttmkfdir, etc... Why do these things have to be necessary? I understand why they are there, and their purpose of course, but Would it not be more beneficial for the font server and X server to both generate these things on their own, and at runtime? The first thought is that doing so would pay a startup speed penalty, however, if it were done, and cached properly, things would be kept to a minimum. My assumption is that things are the way they are more because "it just works" and so their has not been any major need to change it. It is up to the OS vendors such as us to take care of the behind the scenes details in packaging, and config tools, to make it transparent, and/or allow the more technical user to handle things on their own. I am under the belief that these things could possibly be done in a better way, one that is more automated and transparent, not unlike Windows, but at the same time without giving up any functionality that exists now. Just as an example, would it make sense to have xfs automatically look at all the dirs in its config, and have mkfontdir/ttmkfdir/etc. code built in? Just some brainstorming (or brainfarting depending on how you look at it). Any comments or feedback appreciated. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mike A. Harris Shipping/mailing address: OS Systems Engineer 190 Pittsburgh Ave., Sault Ste. Marie, XFree86 maintainer Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3 Red Hat Inc. Phone: (705)949-2136 http://www.redhat.com ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris Red Hat XFree86 mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] General open IRC discussion: #xfree86 on irc.openprojects.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
