Re: fonts

[Gleef <gleef capital net>]

On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Nelson Minar wrote:

> Does GNOME have any plans for dealing with X fonts? What X gives is an
> unholy mess, it would be nice if Gnome could help out.
> 
> The first problem with X fonts is the naming system; it's a
> classification that only a serioius geek could love. Has anyone ever
> seen a good tool for dealing with X font selection? Both Gimp and
> xfontsel basically leave it up to the user to figure out what the hell
> "Spacing" or "Set width" mean. Gimp does at least get rid of some of
> the more obscure settings but it's still hard to use. It'd be nice if
> we could somehow hide the complexity of X's font naming system.
> Family, type (bold/italic), and size are about the only things most
> users want to know about.

GNOME uses a font selection widget based on the GIMP's.  You should notice
that you can get a font selected while ignoring most of the selection
entries, and focus on picking what you know.  IMHO it could be better, but
it's good enough for the moment (i.e. a newbie could use it, but is likely
to be scared by it in the beginning).


> The second problem with X fonts is that there aren't enough nice ones,
> in particular not enough attractive and readble fixed width fonts that
> come with XFree86. 10x20 and good ol' 6x13 (the usual fixed) are good,
> but most of the other fonts designed to be screen fonts don't look
> very good. Are there ready sources of screen fonts beyond what comes
> with XFree?

That's actually what I'm working on, but slowly.  I'm developing an
outline font editor, and some good conversion between raster and outline
fonts.  I was going to call the whole mess FOX (for FOnt eXchange,
inspired by sox), but yet another C++ GUI widget toolkit has come out with
that name, so I have to hunt for a new one.  I would think the world has
enough C++ GUI widget toolkits.

No, it's not in CVS.  I'm don't want to put it there until I have at least
the basic structure down, and life keeps interfering so I'm working very
slowly.

-Gleef