Re: Tool for update of Xft/fontconfig font directory list?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Toralf Lund <toralf kscanners com> writes:
> Wasn't Xft-2 supposed to handle bitmap fonts?
>

Sure, it handles them. But they aren't really useful in most contexts
(most contexts require fonts that can scale), and they clutter the
font selector with a ton of fonts that will look ugly and not work in
all contexts.
 
> I do miss some of them...

The idea is that users can add the 2 or 3 they use to their own
configuration.

> Apart from that, you could obviously have chkfontpath (or similar)
> register different paths with different backends according to some set
> of rules.

I'm not sure what those rules would be, though.

> 1. I was very frustrated when I upgraded to GNOME2/Xft and found that
> a lot of my old fonts were gone from the list, and had to spend a lot
> of time figuring out how to configure the new (more or less
> undocumented) system. chkfontpath integration would at least have
> saved me, and possibly other users, from a lot of frustration during
> upgrade. A suitable %post in the rpm might also be sufficient for this
> purpose, though. A separate tool would have been helpful if it had
> been made easily noticeable (e.g. via desktop links.)
> 2. If you add another font directory you usually want xfs _and_ Xft to
> see it, so you have to update two different sets of config. Being able
> to do it all using just _one_ command would obviously be a lot simpler.
> 3. I know some RPMs that install fonts and call chkfontpath to make
> them visible.

Note that the old font stuff is more or less intended to die
someday. So we don't want to get the two systems overly entangled.

For Xft what I think RPMs should do is install to /usr/share/fonts,
rather than add a new directory.

Docs could definitely be improved.

Havoc