Fontconfig 2.0 Released

david_g writes "Keith Packard released version 2.0 of Fontconfig. Fontconfig is "a library for configuring and customizing font access". It can "discover new fonts when installed automatically, removing a common source of configuration problems", among other nifty functionalities. It comes with Xft2, and there are patches for GTK, Mozilla, and QT3 being readied. Another small step towards world domination..."

Comments

X font problems...

[Lumpy]

every font problem stems from one simple problem... People and programs throw fonts anywhere and everywhere...

if you forced everyone to put fonts in /usr/lib/X11/fonts/ or wherever the Xfree86 people say then the problem is solved.. the font server can easily look for new fonts.

Linux and X suffer from the fact that too many people are allowed to do it their way... it's time to start forcing things to make simple things like fonts easier.

Now we just need fonts!

[dspeyer]

Seriously, all distros I've tried (RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, SuSe) ship with a woefully inadequate supply of fonts. There are thousands of quality free (roughly speech) fonts out there, and I at one time simply ran through free font sites downloading them. While I'm not 100% clear on copyrightability of fonts, there are plenty distributed un-encumbered by their authors. Why doesn't RedHat or somebody pick them up?

Re:Now we just need fonts!

[A-Tech]

Sorry, there aren't thousands of free "quality fonts" on the web:

1) Most of them are decorative or banner fonts which are not suitable for longer documents or any kind of high end postscript.

Try it - take a doc with some of these fonts and then try to output either clean postscript or send it to a RIP. Do not be surprised when it pukes..

2) Many of them are made by well meaning designers, who sometimes lack important technical skills in font making. They rely on the abilities of fontographer to compile everything correctly. So, quality is a mixed bag.

3) Many of these fonts have incomplete glyph sets and can be difficult to use in non iso-88591-1 encodings.

Making good fonts is really really hard and time consuming. (The guy who created Verdana for Microsoft spent more than a year just on that one font.) The new Luxi TTfonts which come with the more recent XFree86 packages is the right direction - well constructed, professionsally designed fonts. Luxi Sans is a good screen font if freetype is setup correctly.

The "problem" with the latest ghostscript fonts is they are not really great screen fonts, but most of them are excellent printer fonts.

Anti-aliasing is not the long term solution either. It just covers for the lack of hinting in a font. Freetype is getting much better though..

A font is in a sense a mini program and they have bugs. Just like other code - debugging them is not for kids.

DirectX & clipboard

[FooBarWidget]

"Hardly... You forgot a strong equivalent to DirectX to give games a place to migrate to (sorry, a mix of OpenGL + some sound library doesn't equate to DirectX)."

How about OpenGL + SDL? Easier and just as powerful as DirectX. SDL handles everything from video to threads to sound to CD-ROMs.

"Then there's _one_ unified sound standard (I think Linux has four or five now),"

Check reality! There are TWO standards: OSS and ALSA.
If you want compatibility with other Unix platforms, use OSS and forget about it. ALSA has OSS emulation. If you want power, use ALSA, which is only available on Linux.
Again: if you want compatibility, use OSS. Or if you're creating a game, use the sound API in SDL! Then you doesn't have to worry about the underlying sound system at all.

"Single standards for the clipboard,"

Has been there for ages. http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards.tx t
Why do people keep mentioning this? Clipboard support has been fixed since KDE 3.0!!!

Re:One problem.

[spitzak]

I know some people are going to apologize, but I agree with this poster.

Though there are lots of reasons to add new interfaces, I find it inexcusable that XFree86 has not been fixed so that the old font interface draws the text anti-aliased.

Lot's of people then say "You don't understand X, it is impossible". But I do understand X. Yes, it will only work on trueColor. Yes, it probably needs to clip the antialiasing off at the edges of the glyph bounding box (I would enlarge the bounding box so this is not a problem). Yes, antialiasing will need to be turned off if they set Xor bitblt mode (I would ignore this problem, actually, nobody xor's fonts). Yes, it won't work with existing font servers. None of these are real problems.

The truth is that the innards of XFree86 are such a mess that nobody could figure out how to remove the 1-bit/pixel limitation from the pipeline between the font renderer and the screen. This is very sad and also indicates that X is very slow and bloated and that nobody will ever be able to fix it. It is also true that there is an incredible paranoia about back-compatability that must be overcome, in fact Linux's ability to ignore back-compatability somewhat is a big advantage over Windows.

I also want to point out that MicroSoft successfully updated their interface to use antialiasing, and they had all the same issues as X did. In case you forgot, originally Windows did not do antialiasing. They changed it and all the old programs started using it *without* being rewritten! The fact that X could not do this same sort of fix is far worse than the delay it has taken to get antialiasing.

Re:Now all we need is....

[NonSequor]

I guess I phrased it wrong. I don't have any problem with CUPS. I should have said that CUPS alone is not enough. It solves one problem, but not the deeper problems caused by having two completely different systems for video and printing. It may be possible to modify Ghostscript to fix these problems, but I think that the possibility of creating a new printing architecture from scratch needs to be considered.