Help on GTK font settings

[Attilio Fiandrotti <fiandro tiscalinet it>]

Hi

As announced [1] by Frans Pop, the debian-installer is soon going to go 
be graphical: it makes use of GTK for the user interface and the 
DirectFB GDK backend insead of X.
Since the debian-installer supports more than 60 different languages we 
need to take glyphs from different fonts [2]: FreeSans is the "default" 
font for latin alphabets, while for different languages we make use of 
specialized fonts (Sazanami Gothic for Japanese etc..).
Now, one annoying issue is that, since FreeSans contains some glyphs 
from some non-latin languages too (Japanese, Chinese, ...), those are 
always used instead of the corresponding glyphs from specialized fonts.
It was proposed [3] that, every time the user decides to use a different 
language, an appropriate entry has to be set into the gtkrc to instruct 
the GTK installer to use a specific font overriding libfontconfig 
preferences.
To support this, we introduced this portion of code

GdkEventClient event;
event.type = GDK_CLIENT_EVENT;
event.send_event = TRUE;
event.window = NULL;
event.message_type = gdk_atom_intern("_GTK_READ_RCFILES", FALSE);
event.data_format = 8;
gdk_event_send_clientmessage_toall((GdkEvent *)&event);
gtk_rc_reparse_all();
while (gtk_events_pending ()) gtk_main_iteration ();

(note that the GDK-DFB implementation of 
gdk_event_send_clientmessage_toall() is an emoty dummy function )

into the main function of the GTK frontend of the debian installer, that 
is called every time something has to be displayed to the user.
Unfortunately this has no effects on fonts-choosing: FreeSans font is 
still used, no matter wha is specified into gtkrc.
Does the idea of forcing a GTK app to use a special fonts setting up an 
appropriate entry into gtkrc is a good idea? and, if it is, is this 
portion  of code enough to make it work?

thanks

Attilio

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/11/msg00021.html
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstallerGUIFonts
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/12/msg00324.html