Re: Help Required

[Spundun Bhatt <spundun ISI EDU>]

Thanx a lot Noah, you did a great job of answering the questions. I know 
Asad's questions were a little vague, but trust me, some how this whole 
fonts cloud is so hazy and confusing that somebody like me cant even 
think of what to ask, except "how do I learn all this mess?" :).
Anyway, your answers give me a thread of questions to pursue so here I 
go, trying to ask more specific questions. :)
1) Does font config have database of all fonts used by all (open source) 
apps? If not what are the examples of common apps not using fontconfig 
on X? and where do they get their fonts from?
2) Is there a difference between fonts and glyphs? If yes, then since 
pango gives sequence of glyphs and font config has database of fonts(I 
hope) where/when does the conversion take place?
3) If pango only gives back a sequence of glyphs then Are we (app using 
pango) responsible for making Xft calls?
4) Are we also responsible for making  fontconfig calls? (how do you use 
fonconfig anyway? is it a library as in -lfontconfig?)
5) specific example: If I do "ls" in my gnome terminal, in a directory 
that has files with unicode names. Is ls responsible for making calls to 
any of the libraries mentioned above? (I hope not), Can ls just output 
unicode to stdout and is the gnome-terminal responsible for rendering 
the unicode? Does gnome-terminal use pango,fontconfig and Xft? or does 
it use something else?
Noah Levitt wrote:
6) If I set fonts to arial or something in my brwser or something, and 
that app tries to render some non english characters, how does it 
successfully render them? how are non english charactes associated with 
these standard fonts? Can I have just one font for say hindi on my 
system and associate that with all fonts, like times new roman, arial, 
courier etc..?

Thanx a lot
Spundun
<Noah's cool fundas snipped>