Re: ps/tt fonts in gnome apps

[Nathan Clegg <nathan islanddata com>]

On 17-Sep-99 James Henstridge wrote:
> Because even though X may use scalable fonts internally, there is no way
> to get at them from the application -- all the X protocols are in terms
> of
> bitmap representation of the glyphs.  This is OK for screen display, but
> not for printing on arbitrary resolution printers.

I knew X had no way of giving the full font definitions to anybody, but
since they are already on the machine in a specific location, I thought
that applications could make use of them instead of worrying about their
own.  I experimented yesterday and found that an entirely different set of
fonts is available in gnumeric, abiword, wordperfect, and gimp, all
running locally on my machine.  If gimp is so good as to inspect my X
fonts, why can not the others?

> The different apps solve the problem in different ways.  Gnumeric uses
> the gnome-print package, and abiword uses its own system.

How can I add to gnome-print's font selectioN?

> If there was a method of getting the vector representation of the glyphs
> from the X server, then those applications could probably be modified to
> use it.

I understand that it would only work locally, but why not just use the
fonts the X server is using?  That doesn't mean they actually have to be
retrieved from the X server itself.



----------------------------------
Nathan Clegg
 nathan@islanddata.com