Re: Say goodbye to core X fonts

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandrakesoft com>]

Le mer 16/04/2003 à 02:59, Owen Taylor a écrit :
> On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 04:05, Frederic Crozat wrote:
> > Le mar 15/04/2003 à 07:59, Owen Taylor a écrit :
> > > I'm just about ready to delete the pangox backend from the HEAD
> > > branch of Pango.
> > > 
> > > To reiterate the reasons:
> > > 
> > >  - With Xft2, there is no good reason that anybody should need
> > >    to use core X fonts rather than Xft.
> > > 
> > >    - Xft2 and current versions of FreeType can access bitmap
> > >      fonts in BDF or PCF format.
> > 
> > Well, currently, in Mdk 9.1, I have to disable Xft2 backend for the
> > following locales otherwise we have really ugly rendering : el, ka, ar,
> > ur, fa (we lack georgian, greek, arabic scalable fonts) and yi (the
> > provided hebrew Type1 fonts are bugged, don't work in Xft)
> > 
> > Are we sure we can have similar (or better) rendering with Xft2 backend
> > ?
> 
> Yes. 
> 
> There are fine scalable Arabic fonts available under
> the GPL. While there are decent Greek outlines available, they
> aren't well packaged into a nice set of fonts, but that could
> be fixed.
> 
> Georgian, I don't know about available  fonts, but IMO, _creating_ a
> Georgian font from scratch would be less work than trying to maintain
> the old core X code.
> 
> Plus, Xft can be used with Greek/Georgian bitmaps without any
> problems.
> 
> If there are problems that are occurring with common
> freely-distributable Hebrew fonts and Yiddish, we need to either
> to fix the fonts or fix the engine.

Great..

FYI, here is what pablo told me (his reply didn't appeared on ml) :

Those are font problems, I mean, it is the glyphs on the fonts that
are ugly, not an Xft2 engine problem.

By installing nice fonts for those languages it works very well and the
result is very eye-candy.
The problem is finding good fonts that are also freely-distributable,
not always easy once you get out of latin/cyrillic. 

There were also (and that was the reason of the explicit desactivation
of Xft for those languages) the impossibility to use bitmap fonts in
previous versions of Xft, so we have the choice of allowing Xft
and having illisible output with default fonts, or disabling it and
being lissible (but not allowing new nice fonts, unless manual edition
of config files).

If the problem with Xft2 for those languages is just "uglyness";
that is, if they are lisible, then Xft2 should be always be actived;
the bitmap fonts for them aren't very nice either, and I suspect all
people using those languages on linux to install proper ttf fonts as one
of their first post-install actions.

Also, the "uglyness" problem with bitmap fonts may be due to the fact
that
no real control is done on which fonts to use;
I mean, for ttf/type1 fonts I put the names of the font to use for
the "sans", "serif" and "mono" special names, so the default choosen
font for non latin scripts when choosing "sans" for example is good
enough;
but I didn't put any reference to bitmap fonts.
In such case, pango seems to take a random font from the ones supporting
the script, and it may, or maynot, be a good choice.

To resume: imho, it is problem of polishing only, and it shouldn't
stop the use and generalisation of Xft.

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandrakesoft com>
Mandrakesoft