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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..."
I use dfontmgr and defoma. Anyone knows how the two systems differs structurally and in practice?
Hmm, the fontconfig page has the withdrawn Microsoft web fonts.
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).
Then there's _one_ unified sound standard (I think Linux has four or five now), because a sound card cannot serve two masters. Single standards for the clipboard, adding/removing menu items from the desktop "Start" menu, mime type associations, adding of control panels, event sounds, display of notification icons in the desktop toolbar, registration of keyboard shortcuts that cut across all applications (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+I means "get the next instant message" and it will get back to the right program no matter if I'm in OpenOffice right now or Mozilla). And all of those standards have to be agreed upon and fully supported by both KDE and Gnome so I can know that all my applications will cooperate nicely with one another and my choice of desktop doesn't equal choice of application interoperability.
Desktop success for Linux is not impossible, far from it, but few people are paying attention to the mounds of things that are _really_ important to giving a typical end user a choice other than Windows vs. Mac OS X (a battle that we already know who wins 95% of the time).
Sigs are for people who started using the net _after_ '86.
No, the reason fonts are so messed up right now is that there has never been a good standard way of rendering fonts, forcing people to come up with their own solutions. So now, we've got tons of old programs using GTK This is all being solved now, but unfortuneately it is being solved woefully late in the game! This should have been addressed at least 5 years ago, and then now we would have this mess and every program/gui toolkit would render fonts in the same, sane manner.
Hopefully Fontconfig will help with straightening this mess out.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Simple Direct media Layer (SDL) and OpenGL not good enough for you? Why not?
/dev/dsp at once."
There are a handful, yes, but ALSA is going to be the new kernel standard in 2.6 and will allieviate the need for oss (current kernel code), esd, artsd, etc - at least as far as "many people writing to
Your choice of desktop never determines your application compatibility - I'm running Galeon right now under KDE3. What's the problem?
Now, that said, I hope KDE and GNOME both drop their VFS layers and encourage the use of something like LUFS that's much more general and will result in less code duplication. We've already seen GNOME and KDE work out a lot, together - like say the XDnD system. These days it seems like the only "war" between the two is in the minds of the non-developers.
--Knots;
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
what is this thing "the desktop" people talk about? It's not like there is some old grandma being kept in front of WinME at the standards institude in Paris to be trundled out as "the desktop" should anyone need to see if they are it or not.
There are (at least) two desktop markets, home and office. They are extremely different.
I doubt Linux can ever take on the home PC market in any useful way without PC's getting a lot simpler.
The office desktop market, however, is a bit different and is something that Linux is already creeping into, much as it did with the server market. How effective it will be overall against Windows is obviously unknown, but if it knocks their market share down even half as much as it did in the server market, well, there'd be a whole heck of a lot more competition in that market than there is right now!
Several factors have come together this year to make the Linux office desktop considerably more appealing (aside from the fact that this is really the first year that the software has been evolved enough to be viable). Microsoft are doing stupid things with their licenses which a lot of users (more often than not out of a general dislike of MS) aren't taking kindly to. Also, the price of a PC, especially a not-kitted-out-for-Doom-III office PC, is getting lower and lower, the margins are squeezed tighter than a duck's butt. You can now buy a PC for the same or less than a copy of Microsoft Office.
Just as Microsoft has commoditized the hardware market out from under the IBM's and Dell's and HPaq's of the world, so things like Linux and Star/OpenOffice are commoditizing the software market out from under Microsoft.
I'm really looking forward to the work between the StarOffice team and OASIS - an agreed standard for XML based office documents provides the opportunity for pretty much all of the not-Microsoft companies who produce office suites to present a united front. Who knows if they will, but the opportunity is there if they want.
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
Plus, by using SDL your app is portable to Windows, BeOS, MacOS, etc. (in theory)
I've done some DirectX programming a while ago and a good bit of SDL programming recently. The SDL and OpenGL APIs are much cleaner and easier to use than DirectX.
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
This really great news. Linux and X have badly needed a unfied way to handle fonts for a long time.
fontconfig adds:
1) Excellent Unicode handling for developers.
2) This resolves the need for developer hacks and workarounds for accessing and displaying available fonts. For programs like Scribus - a Linux Desktop Publisher this will make life much easier in the future.
3) Makes adding and fonts much easier. Now we need a good GUI front end so installing fonts is as easy as Win/Mac.
For desktop linux this is as important as having TCP/IP for networking. (You need good plumbing underneath.)
"no instructions for install/configuration..."
./configure --prefix=/usr/X11R6 && make install.
:("
Read the website! It tells you to
"That, and I don't see any difference in applications... "
Of crouse not.
1. Fontconfig is a font configuration system. It provides information of installed fonts to applications. It's not a user-visible thing.
2. The rendering is done by Xft/FreeType/Whatever, not by fontconfig.
Perhaps you would know that if you read the website.
"If the latter, isn't this kinda useless as a "real" solution, as then it's just another way of configuring/rendering fonts that is mentioned above
This is by no means useless. Fontconfig isn't "another" configuration system. And it sure is *not* a rendering system. Fontconfig is a step towards a *good* configuration system, not "another" one.
Apps don't support it now, but that's not a big deal. The most important thing is that developers have a sane font configuration system now to develop for.
"That, and I don't see any difference in applications..."
Like I've said before (and like the website says): fontconfig does *not* do rendering! Rendering is done by Xft/FreeType/Whatever.
Fontconfig and Xft2 don't make your fonts suddenly look better, font quality depends on the font itself.
Something I couldn't find on the website - is fontconfig network transparent? I.e., is there a way for a remote application to render fonts stored on the local system, or would it have to resort to core X routines?