Font management under X is ABSOLUTELY 100% FUCKED
and I hate it. Under this SuSE system, it appears that when I install a new font, I don't know which applications will be able to use it, because the KDE apps only seem to have scalable fonts available to them and the non-scalable ones are only available to non-KDE apps (so e.g. I can't set Lucida Sans Typewriter 12 as a font in konsole any more). I don't know what name those applications will have to use to refer to the font (which let's say is a musical notation font called Fughetta): they may possibly see a font called "Fughetta", but they're just as likely to see "Fughetta [encoding]" for some quite unpredictable encoding name that Qt or KDE or Xft plucked out of the air somehow. And possibly they won't see it at all -- I have yet to get my feta.ttf to show up anywhere other than in the font installer that assures me it's installed and shows me a nice preview. One thing I do know is that when the font does show up, the character map documentation that came with the font will be useless, because it won't have the same encoding as it was designed with, because Qt or Xft or whoever will have enthusiastically remapped it to Unicode as if it were a text font using some mechanism that probably one guy somewhere wrote and forgot to document. Still, it's fortunate that they'll have remapped it as a text font and not as a musical notation font, because Qt can't render the Unicode musical notation characters because it encodes in UCS-2 and doesn't support surrogate pairs, so it can only render characters from Unicode 3.0 or earlier (the Qt docs mention Unicode 3.2, but they lie). So if it did remap properly, you'd just get blanks -- and indeed if your font is actually designed to use the Unicode code points, blanks are all you ever will get. And I _still_ haven't sussed why although most of my applications use BGR subpixel antialiasing, certain things (like the font installer, in fact) nonetheless use RGB. It just seems that every time someone identifies a perceived deficiency in the X font management model (and there have always been plenty), rather than fix it, they've headed off and implemented something completely different instead, and then deployed both so that neither of them quite works right. And it's like they've done it again and again -- once for antialiasing, once for font naming, once for Unicode mapping, and so on. Every time making the situation more buggered. I'm still waiting for font handling in X to become as good as in Windows 95. Chris ------------------------------------------------------- This SF. Net email is sponsored by: GoToMyPC GoToMyPC is the fast, easy and secure way to access your computer from any Web browser or wireless device. Click here to Try it Free! https://www.gotomypc.com/tr/OSDN/AW/Q4_2003/t/g22lp?Target=mm/g22lp.tmpl _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
