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

Re:Now all we need is....

[JohnMunsch]

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).

completely wrong

[Ender Ryan]

I agree with you that fonts in Linux are really messed up at this point, but your completely wrong about why. It has nothing to do with WHERE they are kept on a system.

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.

Re:Now all we need is....

[_Knots]

Simple Direct media Layer (SDL) and OpenGL not good enough for you? Why not?

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 /dev/dsp at once."

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;

Re:Now all we need is....

[micahjd]

You're forgetting SDL... SDL along with OpenGL (which it interates with very nicely) provide pretty much the same scope of functionality as DirectX.

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.