Re: RFP: XP font mapping mechanism

From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Oct 03 2002 - 02:26:46 EDT

  • Next message: Andrew Dunbar: "Re: RFP: XP font mapping mechanism"

     --- Jody Goldberg <jody@gnome.org> wrote: > On Wed,
    Oct 02, 2002 at 03:29:46PM -0400, Dom
    > Lachowicz wrote:
    > > Hi,
    > >
    > > So my latest build doc brought up some confusion
    > on IRC about what the
    > > "Luxi Sans" font was, and is an example of a much
    > larger problem - we
    > > have no good font name mapping solution in place,
    > so necessarily some
    > > font information gets lost when a document moves
    > from one machine to
    > > another (and especially across platforms), and is
    > parallel to the font
    > > embedding problem that Joaquin and I were
    > discussing last month.
    >
    > Before solving this in abi-code there are a few
    > things to think about
    >
    > 1) This should be solved in a more general location
    > so that the
    > configuration can be shared by other
    > document-centric apps.
    > I don't know where this would live. However, it
    > is definitely
    > something that the user should be able to
    > configure once for all
    > office apps.
    >
    > 2) It may actually already be solved on the unix
    > side via keith
    > Packard's 'fontconfig' package that is used by
    > default in
    > gtk-2.1 (pango HEAD). How well this would work
    > on other
    > platforms is unclear.
    >
    > 3) A very similar problem arises when printing. So
    > we should
    > explore how that is handled.
    >
    > At GUADEC 3 Keith's talk and some questions
    > afterward suggested that
    > this was exactly what fontconfig was targeted at.
    > However, I did
    > not think to ask about its cross platform status.
    >
    > In gnumeric I've specificly avoided doing a real
    > solution to wait
    > for this. However, you can at least avoid losing
    > informat by
    > storing both the requested font and the display
    > font. So that on
    > export you can dump the original.

    This is what I suggested when it last came up in
    abi-dev. We load a document, map the fonts, and when
    we save it we have something like
    "explicit-font:Arial",
    "mapped-font:zz_AbiWordUglyArial".
    No matter what platform (or preferably what software)
    the document passes through, "explicit_font" should
    not be changed unless a user specifically alters it.
    "mapped=font" can be lost, changed, or added to by
    other software for best results.

    That's probably too simple for all real-world problems
    but I think it's pretty small and well-defined.

    Andrew Dunbar.

    =====
    http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com

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