RE: Latin2 fonts problem

[Marcin Gorycki <mgo olicom dk>]

> Fortunately, it is easy to modify these themes with a text 
> editor.  You
> find the themes in <prefix>/share/themes.  In each directory you find
> <themename>/gtk/gtkrc.  Open that file with a text editor, 
> and you should
> see, near the top, a section titled [style "default"], inside that
> section, you should see a line saying [font = "<some font 
> descriptor>"],
> just change the font descriptor to the one you want.  

Of course I can modify the gtkrc file, but this is not my point! My point is
that I shouldn't be forced to do such things. I think everything is already
in place for the gtk theme engine to be able to select the correct font for
my language. 

> Now, if you want to change for good, so that the new fonts 
> don't go away
> when you update gtk-engines, you need to do the same thing as 
> above, but
> in the source directory.  First, unless you are using CVS, go to the
> directory just above your gtk-engines source directory, and 
> copy it ...

I don't think this is acceptable. We are aiming GNOME not only at hackers,
but also at my mother and my grandmother. I am sure they will not want to
have anything to do with modifying sources in CVS. The whole point is to
make the thing easy to use by dummies.

> The trouble is that even if someone mapped every possible 
> language code to
> a font, you can't assume that the font is available on the 
> system using
> the language code.

Well, you can't count on having the font required by the theme either, do
you ? E.g. Metal uses some weird font name that I'm sure will not always be
available on every computer.

Of course this whole subject is far from being trivial, but hey, KDE can do
it, so we should be too!
One (most primitive way) would be to define the font as something like:

...-*-%1-%2

and then the engine would substitute %1 with e.g. "iso8859" and "%2" with
"2", according to the locale currently in effect. Of course this must be
more complicated than that (I am totally "green" on this subject), but we
could think about something to that effect.

J. Marcin Gorycki
mailto:mgo@olicom.dk