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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..."
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.
No need for Keith Packard to distribute them? Or no need for Microsoft to pull them?
The move on Microsoft's part was good strategy -- they've effectively broken all those font installers that previously used www.microsoft.com as their download site. Of course, it won't be long before they're updated, but they've made installers released before that date break.
Keith Packard's distribution of them is also a good thing. The EULA permits it, so why not mirror it all over the place?
I guess I don't understand what you're getting at.
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.
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
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
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.
The documentation included in this release is aimed at helping get applications ported to the library, not at helping get systems configured to use the library. That kind of documentation is needed, but it just hasn't been written yet.
Fontconfig has been released, but that's only relevant to application development right now.