Re: ISO-8859-2 fonts

[Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com>]

Hello!

>    Do you think it would be reasonable to drop the GnomeFont<->X11
> font mapping we have now and go for pure GnomeFont/rasterized fonts in
> Gnumeric instead?
>
>    Is gnome-print ready to take on a task like this?

Honestly I do not know.

There are some issues, I have to address, but they are relatively easy
(like adding real LRU glyph cache).

The biggest problem is, that, using GdkCanvas, we have to draw fonts via
pixmaps - it means generating loads of pixmaps on X server in case you
happen to have many fonts - and it can become real show-stopper in
some real-world situation (my XFree4.0 16MB server seems to handle
3-5 fonts well - but how about different X servers etc.)

The problem is non-existent for antialiased canvas - but that is still
slow in many real situations (X server over 10Mbps ethernet etc.).

Also gnome-print font implementation cannot match printer font metrics
exactly - but that is solvable problem, unlike with X fonts.

So I'd suggest following .plan:

If gnumeric start moving to unicode, we could implement all text-drawing
routines through wrapping code (like evolution is using EFont). It is even
more justified, than for evolution, because in gnumeric we want to keep
exact printer-screen matching, even if utf-8 will be handled directly
by Gtk+ 2.0.

That wrapping code should go to gnome-print/gnome-font, and using our
private knowledge of fonts, we can really make a way to specify compile
time whether to use X or client-rendered fonts.

I hope that most X servers can handle that load. If it turns out to be
a problem, we have either to use antialased canvas, or wait for new
X rendering extensions, in which case gnome-font will be responsible to
supply X with fine-tuned fonts anyway.

Lauris