https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=118131 ------- Comment #81 from mfabian@novell.com 2007-02-06 04:24 MST ------- Hans-Peter Jansen> What about patch #3? I don't understand neither Hans-Peter Jansen> freetype nor pcf fonts well enough do describe what Hans-Peter Jansen> the patch is for, what consequences it has (other Hans-Peter Jansen> than mangling the font name) and who's the Hans-Peter Jansen> orginator, but it looks interesting enough. That patch is necessary to distinguish between fonts like "Misc Fixed", "Sony Fixed", "ETL Fixed", ... Without that patch, all these would show up only as "Fixed" in font selection dialogs. This is very confusing and you cannot select some fonts at all then. For example if you use konsole and select the custom "Fixed" and then change the size you may get a "Misc Fixed" font at some size and a "Sony Fixed" at another size and you will wonder why the font style changes so drastically just by changing the size by one pixel. And you may not be able to select "Foo Fixed" at all because "Bar Fixed" happens to be used if both are just called "Fixed". This patch has another useful benefit. The Adobe bitmap fonts from Xorg are called "Adobe Helvetica", "Adobe Times", and "Adobe Courier" with this patch instead of just "Helvetica", "Times", and "Courier". Many web pages specify "Helvetica", "Times", and "Courier" and if the names of the bitmap fonts are exactly like that, most browsers will use the bitmap fonts. This is usually not what one wants, the pages will then show weird mixtures of bitmap fonts with antialiased fonts. Of course one could disable these bitmap fonts in fontconfig completely. But I think it is nicer to still have them available with the "Adobe *" names than to disable them completely. If there is no "Helvetica", a fallback like "Arial" or "Nimbus Sans L" will be used which is much better than using these old bitmap fonts. I made this patch originally. I discussed it upstream on the freetype mailing list. First, the freetype developers liked it and wanted to include it. Then somebody said that that one shouldn't put the foundry name into the font name. But there are many fonts doing that, for example "Bitstream Vera Sans" or "Arial Unicode MS" (the latter has the foundry even at the end, i.e. it is not done in a consistant way at all by the font makers). It was suggested that all the font dialogs should be changed to be able to display and select the foundry as well. But this is not easy either. It will take a long time to change all KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice, Firefox, whatever, ... font dialogs like that. Currently none of them lets you select the foundry, only the family. And if many completely different fonts have the same family name you cannot select the fonts you want anymore. On top of that, trying to get more options into dialogs often meets resistance by the GUI designers: "We don't want to many options, nobody understands that". I think that is silly, one should not treat users as stupid. Anyway, prepending the foundry name to the family name for the bitmap fonts solved that problem at hand. It is a pragmatic solution, but it works well. I should try to discuss this again upstream, the last time the discussion was completely sidetracked, the thread became very long and at the end it led nowhere. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug, or are watching someone who is.