On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 12:40 -0400, Stuart Brorson wrote: > >> If you know of some documentation to the .ttf format, I could knock > >> up a > >> conversion to run based on libgeda reading its own fonts and dumping > >> data. > > > > I don't know anything about cairo, but the Freetype library makes > > short work of dealing with TrueType fonts. I'd assume it wouldn't be > > too difficult to use it to generate the glyphs and hand them to the > > cairo subsystem. > > Woah, there!
> Before you go down that path, please let me remind you that you're > introducing more dependencies into gEDA/gaf which will come back > and bite you on the ****. > > I'm not fond of cairo since it's a fast-moving dependency and is not > present on many standard distros. Also, it's slooooooow on lots of > platforms. However, as a developer experiment, I figure it's harmless > as long as we also support the same features in GDK, and can turn > cairo off during configure time. (And it remains off for now.) Cairo is present on all distros which support Gnome since 2005/2006. It is improving fast, but hasn't yet (to my knowledge) broken its API/ABI, so its not a pain (like Guile) to depend against. I realise that the userfont stuff won't be present until cairo 1.8, and that is a pain. > As for Freetype, I *strongly* urge you to avoid it since it's also not > present on many (most) Linux distros, and it will also drag in > fontconfig and ${DEITY} knows what other libs. I've had to deal with > installing Freetype, and they use their own non-standard build system > to build and install the library. For me, getting their build system > integrated into a larger install was a total nightmare [1]. Pity the > poor, ignorant user who will be required to install all the garbage > necessary to make Freetype work on his system. I thought Freetype is quite common*, and it might even be possible to cut-paste bits from it. For most users, apt-get, rpm, yum, yast, portage, ports(?) will allow them to install this without manually compiling from source. > IMO, using yet another external library is not worth the inevitable > support headache just to get some pretty fonts. Since GTK2.8, users already have cairo of some version, so it should be no harm there. Peter *Our definitions of common may be slightly disparate, if you're finding boxen without cairo. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user