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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..."
For a second, I thought I had clicked on my shortcut to freshmeat.net
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
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Hmm, the fontconfig page has the withdrawn Microsoft web fonts.
As the download page said: "Did you read the license?"
1. (item 2) Reproduction and Distribution. You may reproduce and distribute an unlimited number of copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT; provided that each copy shall be a true and complete copy, including all copyright and trademark notices, and shall be accompanied by a copy of this EULA. Copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT may not be distributed for profit either on a standalone basis or included as part of your own product.
Internet Explorer was unable to link to the Web page you requested. The page might use standard HTML or CSS.
An easier way to configure printers, complete M$ Office interoperability
You mean aside from CUPS and Crossover Office?
CUPS has a number of front-ends to it that are *very* easy to use, and provides an easy, GUI-oriented way to deal with printers - as its freshmeat writeup says, "it has been developed to promote a standard printing solution for all UNIX vendors and users."
Crossover Office isn't Free (and I don't run it for precisely that reason), but if the only thing tieing you or your company to Windows is the need for complete Office support, it's the most promising option out there. General word processing is better served by AbiWord, in my opinion, but this is not a sticking point of any note anymore.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
World Domination?! Is that was this is all about? I thought it was the ticket line for LotR: Two Towers... damn, now I have to find the real line and start all over again!
Nosce te Ipsum
every font problem stems from one simple problem... People and programs throw fonts anywhere and everywhere...
/usr/lib/X11/fonts/ or wherever the Xfree86 people say then the problem is solved.. the font server can easily look for new fonts.
if you forced everyone to put fonts in
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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?
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
If there's one thing that desktop Linux needs, it's straightening out the whole font/X mess. Nice to see some serious stuff getting done abouting. Propz, gratz, and thankz to the whole team.
I have used cups, as well as various lp programs, and it always seems to be more of a "server" app rather than a client configuration. I understand that M$'s print spooler is technically a "server" app, but it really doesn't have that feel. You don't need to know anything to set up a winblows printer, and albeit windows printers are a bit more limited for cross-network printing (not much, but a little), they are easier to set up (mostly due to HW manufacturers actually supporting drivers for them).
And OpenOffice.org is almost there, but there is no Exchange client, and the imports are just a little bit off. No biggie on the imports, but I am a very big proponent of Exchange in the enterprise, and I am not alone (althouh for the internet, Exchange is a whore!).
My vision of Linux is a drop in replacement for many NT services, both server and desktop, as well as have the ability to interoperate with existing infrastructure. Microsoft is attempting to pull users to their servers with their Unix services for Windows package, Let's keep them here by giving administrators the flexibility that they need to provide a complete solution for business needs. This means opportunity to choose the OS that they feel is best for the job, without having to change over the whole camp!
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
My wife won't run Linux until there's a WYSIWYG HTML editor to replace DreamWeaver.
Software Wars
Ghostscript is also very slow loading TrueType fonts. Since it looks like TrueType fonts are going to continue to dominate desktop computing, Ghostscript needs to handle them better. Your printouts will never look the same as what's on your screen if Ghostscript can't render all of the fonts that X can.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
... that a project like this, which claims to "implement high quality, anti-aliased and subpixel rendered text on a display" can have such an ugly website without any screenshots.
--Jon (watches karma burn)
Cleanstick.org: Dumb weblog about nothing
Dreamweaver 4 is working or very nearly in Crossover Office, it's not yet officially supported though, perhaps the next release.
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
Fontconfig did compile fine, but the CVS pango version seems borked ... too bad ... no nice fonts ;)
To use it you have to patch your QT, GTK and Mozilla. I'm not a very good programmer but why couldn't the API be the same so these apps would 'just work'? Maybe I just don't understand how it works.
All I know is that two big barriers to the desktop are fonts and printing. So I'm glad that things are being developed to make it easier.
The Anti-Blog
I'm considering trying to switch to Linux and CUPS sounds interesting. I also happen to be in need of a new printer (I currently have an HP 5L, but it jams if I insert more than one sheet at a time).
So, can anyone recommend a laser printer with high (or perfect) compatibility with Linux? I'm looking for one that can do at least 10 ppm and 600 dpi (though 1200 dpi would be preferable). Price is not so much a concern, though I would prefer one < $400.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Simple Direct media Layer (SDL) and OpenGL not good enough for you? Why not?
/dev/dsp at once."
There are a handful, yes, but ALSA is going to be the new kernel standard in 2.6 and will allieviate the need for oss (current kernel code), esd, artsd, etc - at least as far as "many people writing to
Your choice of desktop never determines your application compatibility - I'm running Galeon right now under KDE3. What's the problem?
Now, that said, I hope KDE and GNOME both drop their VFS layers and encourage the use of something like LUFS that's much more general and will result in less code duplication. We've already seen GNOME and KDE work out a lot, together - like say the XDnD system. These days it seems like the only "war" between the two is in the minds of the non-developers.
--Knots;
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
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."
/dev/dsp* if the hardware supports it. If the hardware doesn't support it, you still need a software mixer.
Not true... Alsa only supports multiple access to
Dinivin
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
On freshmeat, there's a new(ish) project called Ginf (for 'Ginf Is Not Frontpage') -- it's a GTK-based WYWIWYG HTML Editor. All I've looked at so far is the screenshots. Looks pretty basic right now, but could be the start of something good. Wish I knew C, because that's definitely an itch I'd like to scratch.
Software Wars
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.)
The HP family of printers are actually great printers. I am not farmiliar with the 5L, but the 6L and 1100 were gravity-fed styles. Avoid these like the plague. We use old 4L's (they're tanks) and 1200's (new, about $650 cdn) and they are great under Linux using 4L drivers. These also speak native postscript, pcl5, and pcl6 for the 1200. Very compatible with almost everything.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Lexmark's low end Postscript printers are advertized as Linux compatible. check out www.lexmark.com for latest models. I love my 320.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Yes, gravity-fed do usually suck. However, the one I bought real cheap ("broken") was fixed with a cheap separator pad. Shortly after I bought the pad, HP offered me one for free. Shortly after that I got notice of a class action lawsuit against HP regarding the problem the original owner had experienced. :-) That was an 1100.
Samsung has great Linux compatability and they have some good USB laser printers for under $200.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
SDL is just a wrapper over underlying sound mechanisms. Plus, while SDL and OpenGL may be cleaner (okay, the are definately cleaner) they are far less powerful than DirectX. Now, with OpenGL 2.0 coming out and if OpenAL and OpenML get integrated into SDL, things might change, but as yet, there is still not real competition to DirectX.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The current problems are exactly what I stated, myriads of programs rendering fonts in myriads of different, incompatible, non-extensible manners.
So now we have tons of applications that can't take advantage of the new TT, AA, etc. rendering features.
Currently, there are thousands of programs written in GTK 1.x, Qt 1/2.x, Motif, etc., all of which render fonts in different manners, using different font configurations of their own, etc.
Plus the lack of good, standard, open source fonts included with distibutions.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Could a broken separator pad be the problem I'm having in my HP 5L? Would that be something that could cause it to jam if more than one sheet is inserted at a time?
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Damn, why wasn't I let in on that suit? We bought half a dozen of them at our office when they first came out! We went through the pad thing, then replaced them with the 1200's when they were available. I still have 2 working 1100's here somewhere....
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
"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)."
x t
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.t
Why do people keep mentioning this? Clipboard support has been fixed since KDE 3.0!!!
Easiest printers: pdq
I was a die hard lpd user for many years, but last week I tried out pdq and had my printer working perfectly (both text and Postscript) in less than 5 minutes. Use xpdq to do the configuration.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
AFAIK the Mozilla shipped is bog-standard, however, if you want to try fontconfig without too much hassle, I really recommend (null).
Get it from your favourite Red Hat mirror - I personally use rpmfind.net
Cheers,
Michel
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Bad idea. Hardware should be autodetected.
That, and I don't see any difference in applications... is this suppose to be transparent (I assume so), or do apps have to be written specifically to use Xft2.so? 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
I don't know anything about it, but it sure sounds like SDL and ADSL is the agreed on thing for games and sound. I would dearly love to see Linux do better than Windows and actually make an interface that is usable for *both* games and regular programs, but it looks like that ain't going to happen.
Single standard for the clipboard: it exists now. The problem is older programs that don't know about CLIPBOARD. There is no way to fix this. Windows would have the exact same problem if somebody decided to make drag-less drag & drop, which is really what the middle-mouse cut & paste is.
Adding/removing menu items from the Start menu. I believe there is a standard that KDE and Gnome follow. But good luck trying to find it described anywhere. There is a serious need for this to be documented in a simple and obvious way with explicit "it is in this file and here is an example", without the need for Qt or any library to read it (the library is also a fatal problem on Windows). Without this other window managers and other programs will not use it.
Mime type associations. This could also be done with more config files, but I would really like to see a more Unix solution, which is the addition of a simple "open" command-line program. Any GUI that wants to "open" a file just runs this program. It can do anything it wants. There should also be simple "mail" and "print" programs that take the data in stdin and do the right thing, it is quite annoying that Mozilla knows how to mail on my machine but the "mail" program does not. In a similar vein, I would like to see the prefixes like smb: and html: on files be handled by the glibc library level so that *ALL* programs can read/write these without linking in Qt libraries.
By "adding control panels" I think you mean adding stuff to the "configuration" application. One idea is to make a tiny extension to the Start menu, so that if you have a program lying around that "configures" something, it can appear where the user will look for it, in the list of stuff in the configuration program. It does not really matter if this opens another window. I would avoid any complexity about describing the questions or imbedding panels and other than this "run some other program" leave the design and implementation of configuration up to the programmers. Windows and Mac have fallen into the trap of making a seperate app for each part of configuration, this artificially seperates concepts into program packages, which does not necessarily agree with how users catagorize concepts.
I don't think event sounds are a big deal. Looking at Windows you can see that virtually all event sounds are specific to each application. I would consider this part of the application's configuration and as a beginning user would expect to find it there.
Display of notification icons in the desktop toolbar: here I would disagree. One thing I would like to see is the ability to change GUI ideas. If applications can assumme a toolbar it is bad news, we will never be rid of it. I think the ultimate interface will someday get rid of all things on the screen other than the data being worked on, but stupid stuff like this is what is keeping us frozen with ideas from 1985...
Registration of keyboard shortcuts is exactly the same as the "Start" menu stuff, and should be stored in the same place. One big help is that there be no difference between "applications" and "actions" so that either can be on a start menu or on a shortcut. Windows also blows in this area. "Getting back to the right program" is a window manager issue and is true whether a shortcut of a menu item or typing a command brought up the new program. Windows also screws up here, worse than most X window managers, if you have ever closed two nested modal control panels you know what I mean.
So we need a "start menu configuration" which in my opinion should be the union of a directory in your home and a system-wide directory. Each file and subdirectory describes a single "item" or a submenu. There are special names to make menu items appear in different places such as the configuration application or in the popup, or as a shortcut key. The files should be trivial to parse without using a library. It should be trivial to locate documentation describing every detail of these files without going off into unrelated areas of the desktops.
We also need command-line tools that appliations can use in place of libraries. We need "open", "mail", "print", etc. We also need a unified file interface where "http:" and other prefixes work for every program like cat and the shells.
Then your beef isn't with CUPS, it's with Ghostscript. CUPS is great. It also works great on my Mac running OSX Jaguar. And I have _no_ problems rendering TrueType fonts, but that's apple's fault :)
What? How can it get any harder than the KDE printer configurator? It is butt-simple. Just choose your model, a driver, and that's it. You can even print over an NT netowork to a shared SMB printer without any problems.
If ALSA also doesn't do what you want, www.opensound.com has AWESOME commercial drivers that can mix over 50 PCM streams at one time, real time, with low CPU utilization. It works just like directsound.
Plus, SDL is cross-platform and does most of what DirectX does, using open standards and OpenGL for 3D accelleration.
Call me an idealist, but I see replacing closed source with closed source as robbing Peter to pay Paul
But in a pinch...
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
I always find it amusing when I read a "Linux is dead" post. On the desktop or server it doesn't really matter the statement is flawed.
On the server Linux is plodding along taking more and more market share and slowly winning. On the desktop Linux has not really been born yet but it is plodding along getting better and better. Eventually it will start taking market share in that area as well. You see, Linux can't really be stopped. There is no way to buy it, crush it, intimidate it or otherwise derail it. Microsoft has tried all of there tricks but in the end there it is plodding along getting better and better.
No, Microsoft can't win against Tux. They can only delay the inevitable.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
If you need Exchange compatibility, quitcherbitchin and pay for the Evolution extension. Yeah, it's proprietary, but so's Exchange.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Okay, so if you want to write audio apps, there's OSS. Okay, if you want to get down to it, GNOME and KDE have their own sound *servers* which communicate with OSS/ALSA/whatever. Doing it that way just makes *sense* because KDE and GNOME run on more than one platform, not just Linux. Linux ain't the only game in town, and neither is Windows. MS forgets that and foists Windows-only, x86-only crapola like DirectX on us.
And if you want to target Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc. DirectX is a poor choice. Heck, if you want to target something other than Windows DirectX is a stupid choice. SDL targets a number of platforms and will even work with OpenGL (which is an open standard, and even has MS as part of its steering committee.)
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Damn, you kids gotta learn how to troll. Come up with something harder to refute, man!
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
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.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Actually, the current X implementation of subpixel rendering isn't nearly as good as Cleartype itself. This is speaking from personal experience. I've got a 133 dpi laptop screen, and Cleartype makes fonts look like I'm reading a piece of paper. Sub-pixel AA in Xft has less color fringing for certain fonts, but overall the edges look harsher, and in many cases the type is rendered much more lightly than Cleartype renders it. This becomes quite a problem with italic fonts. The italic fonts on /.'s front page, for example, are really hard to read because Xft renders them one-pixel thick, which is very hard to see when the pixels are so small. Cleartype renders it with more fuzz (magnified) but the letters look much more substantive. Also, there are a lot of tricks with partial hinting and gamma correction that Cleartype does and Xft doesn't.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Windows-only, x86-only crapola like DirectX
>>>>>>>
DirectX might be Windows only and x86 only, but it isn't crapola. Give good technology the respect that it deserves.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Umm, DirectX isn't a wrapper. DirectX is an independent system that bypasses a lot of antiquated Windows functionality. DirectX is usually supported at the driver level, existing alongside Windows APIs like GDI and Win32 audio. SDL is a wrapper over whatever services are native to the platform. On Windows, SDL is a wrapper over DirectX. On Linux, its a wrapper over OSS and the XInput APIs.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The DirectX API
A) Doesn't suck.
B) Isn't loaded with cruft. Thanks to COM interface versioning, the newest DirectX interfaces are comparitively clean. It just seems much junkier than it is due to MSs way of naming fields and methods and its insistance on using structures to pass API parameters.
C) It isn't controlled by a single interest. Its the result of a lot of back and forth between MS, hardware manufacturers, and software developers.
I despise Windows as much as the next guy, but lying about its strenghts doesn't help.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
However (and correct me if I'm wrong here), ALSA can do that transparently, removing the need for pretty much forcing esd or similar on users.
ALSA itself does not do software mixing in the drivers.. A 3rd party app (such as esd, arts, or even an alsa specific one) would be needed to do this and audio applications would have to be written to support it.
Only hardware mixing would be truly transparent (or, possibly, software mixing in the drivers).
Dinivin
That's quite poor, if it decides the card can't handle multiple sources (which I guess would be fairly easy at the driver level), it should really start some kind of software mixer automatically. ;)
As it happens I'm using commercial OSS anyway, but that's not the point
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
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?
Been doing that for years. Its not the quality of the rendering (glyph shapes) its the quality of the smoothing mechanism.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...