Re: postscript fonts vs. pango aliases

["Adrian E. Feiguin" <afeiguin uci edu>]

Hi Owen,
Sorry to keep bothering with this, but some odd things are confusing 
me. I'm using the default RH9 installation packages, with the urw fonts.
I started setting the aliases for the 35 adobe fonts, using teh urw 
equivalents. They are all installed using fc-cache, and they all show up 
with the libgnomeprint test programs. For instance, if I use fonts 
--dump, and I look at the list of fonts,  I get, among others:

URW Gothic L Book
URW Gothic L Book Oblique
URW Gothic L Demi
URW Gothic L Demi Oblique


(It's not relevant, but I want to set these as the equivalents for the 
PS fonts:

AvantGarde-Book
AvantGarde-BookOblique
AvantGarde-Demi
AvantGarde-DemiOblique
)


To test this, I do

font_desc = pango_font_description_from_string("URW Gothic L Book 18");
gtk_widget_set_font(widget, font_desc);

and I get:

WARNING **: Couldn't load font "URW Gothic L Book 18" falling back to 
"Sans 18"

What am I doing wrong?

Another one: the correct name of the "Nimbus Roman No9, Medium" does not 
work, and I have to use "Nimbus Roman No9, Regular" instead.

And finally, "Standard Symbols L, Regular" and "Digbats" don't display 
nothing at all.

Can you explain this?
Thank you!
<ADRIAN>




Owen Taylor wrote:

> On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 13:14, Adrian E. Feiguin wrote:
>  
>
> > I understand what you are saying, I've been digging into gnome-print and 
> > I get it. The reason why I'm hesitant of doing it this way is: my code 
> > is more primitve and basic, but simpler; and the main point, I 
> > understand that pango cannot render symbol fonts (yes, it's a font 
> > problem and not a pango problem), and symbols are crucial to a 
> > scientiffic application like mine.
> >    
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "cannot render symbol fonts". As long
> as the fonts encoding can be represented in Unicode, there is no
> problem at all... a font like Adobe Symbol works fine because all
> the symbols are in Unicode. Your font could also put its characters
> in the Unicode PUA and that would work fine. If your font has
> a completely custom character map, you'll need something like
> the PangoFcDecoder stuff that Chris Blizzard did for pango-1.5
> to allow use of Pango for Mozilla's MathML support.
>
>  
>
> > So my idea was, if tha urw-fonts package in the gimp repository includes 
> > the 35 basic Adobe fonts, I should't have problems using them. But for 
> > some reason, after installing them, I can display them using xfontsel, 
> > but not with gnome-print or pango. Why is that?
> >    
>
> I'm not sure what you are running on your system. If you have a 
> reasonably modern system, to install fonts looks like
>
> <copy fonts somewhere within /usr/share/fonts>
> # fc-cache /usr/share/fonts
>
> The urw-fonts package you'd find in most recent distributions
> should do the right thing automatically, and I think most remotely
> recent distributions should have urw-fonts intstalled by default.
> (Red Hat has been doing so for at least 5 years.)
>
>  
>
> > I am planning to take a look at ggv now, but I'm not sure this is a good 
> > idea.
> > Thank you for any advice,
> >    
>
> I think gpdf is going to be more useful. ggv is just a ghostscript
> frontend, gpdf uses some parts of the gnome-print API. Though I'd look a
> very recent version since some bugs were fixed recently in font
> handling. But it's certainly going to be cleaner if you can work with
> gnome-print, and Pango rather than drop down lower-level.
>
> Regards,
> 					Owen
>
>