Re: DiaFont abstraction and namespacing

[Hans Breuer <hans breuer org>]

At 16:12 23.06.02 +0200, Cyrille Chepelov wrote:
> Le Sun, Jun 23, 2002, à 03:32:23PM +0200, Hans Breuer a écrit:
>
> > > Which comments ? 
> > "The Pango people don't seem to encounter the real world much..."
>
> Oh ! This is not mine...
>
> > Impressive, if it wouldn't pop up about 8 message boxes with:
> >      Trying to set invalid font arial, helvetica, helv, sans!
> >      Trying to set invalid font courier new, courier, monospace, fixed!
> > on UML
> > classes; which isn't Lars' fault but some strangeness with BASIC_SANS_FONT,
> > BASIC_MONOSPACE_FONT etc.
>
>
> Yes, I selected that, because on my system, plain "monospace" and "sans" are
> flat out ugly. 
Having a ugly font for 'monospace', 'sans', 'serif' is a Pango 
configuration problem. There is some pango.aliases file which
needs to be adapted to make these font's look nice. Otherwise
your widget fonts won't look nice too ...

> We should fix Lars' selector to keep only the first valid 
> item of a comma-separated list (Pango does this on its side).
IMO fixing at the wrong place ... With this approach we'll
hardcode families again. Depending on a proper Pango 
configuration aems right to me. 

> > > Means dia is now hardcoded to only three families ? 
> > Nope. But these constants could be used for some simplifiction like
> >
> >      dia_font_new_from_style(DIA_FONT_SANS | DIA_FONT_BOLD, 0.42) 
> >
> > which I hope could replace the BASIC_SANS_FONT, ... above. It appears
> > to me that at least the win32 Pango backend isn't capable of
> > loading such.
> Oh, I see.
I'll take this as a 'yes please' ;-)

> > With my approach there would only be one central place in font.c
> > where the assignment between "BASIC_*" and a real font name needs
> > to happen. I'm not sure if even there it is required than. Pango
> > should be able to give me a font from style only - without
> > naming it. As font info to store one would have the font name
> > _and_ the style as fallback.
>
> And how do you get the specific families, then ?
Answered below ?

> > What I like to get though is a - per default - shorter list
> > of fonts to select from. In the spirit of useability and
> > the ability to exchange diagrams between platforms with
> > differnt font sets. 
> > I am thinking of a GtkFifoOptionMenu with a details entry to 
> > select additional fonts from the standard Gtk font selector, 
> > to have the choice of using any font available on the system. 
>
> Hmmm. Sounds good, then.
As first shot Lars' Font Selector would simply stay as is.

> > > (there are so many
> > > available families on my system I have to scroll through three
screenfuls of
> > > the font widget -- with 1024 dots of vertical resolution).
> > Is this the new kind of useability, menus about 3072 pixels long :-) ?
>
> Ahem.
One issue with my approach is where to get the first few fonts
to display. But again this could fall back to 'Sans', 'Serif',
'Monospace' which have to exist with any working Pango installation.

        Hans
-------- Hans "at" Breuer "dot" Org -----------
Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to 
get along without it.                -- Dilbert