CSS fonts only?

[Gail Carmichael <gail banaszkiewicz gmail com>]

Hi everyone!

I just joined this list because I've been working on text in Inkscape 
for the last year or so (though mostly just during last year's Summer of 
Code, what with being busy in school), which as you probably know uses 
Pango for font management.

One thing I would like to do in Inkscape is add support for font faces 
that cannot described in CSS.  I started laying the foundation for this 
last year, but cannot go further because Pango does not support fonts 
beyond those which CSS can support (please correct me if I have 
misunderstood this fact!).

I would very much like to continue in this direction this summer, but to 
do this, Pango would have to change.  The purpose of this email is to 
find out from you guys whether this is possible.  Being a newcomer, I am 
unsure whether there are some fundamental or philosophical issues to be 
considered before adding to the possibilities in the font weight and 
variant and style (etc) structures.

Having said all this, if it IS desirable to support more variety of 
fonts, in the sense that the font structures can describe these fonts 
fully, I am interested in contributing to Pango to make this happen, 
likely as part of this year's Summer of Code (through Inkscape).

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Gail
(http://gailcarmichael.com if you want to know more about me)