Draining the font swamp

[Jan Claeys]

Op zaterdag 19-05-2007 om 12:34 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef Matt
Zimmerman:
> There has been some confusion and dissatisfaction over the treatment
> of fonts in Ubuntu for a some time now, and no common understanding of
> how to improve the situation.  I spent a little time thinking about
> this today, and would like to present some questions whose answers I
> hope will help us to make some progress.

My problem with fonts in Ubuntu is the same problem/dilemma that I had
with fonts on Windows in the past:

      * I want to be able to have a lot of fonts installed on my system,
        so that things look like they are intended to look when viewing
        them.
      * I don't want all of those fonts to be listed in the default font
        dialogs and font selection widgets.

And when I'm doing graphic/design work:

      * I want to have hundreds or thousands of fonts available and
        those that I use in a certain project (which can involve lots of
        different applications) easily accessible.


One possible solution to the issues above would be to add a system to
fontconfig (or on top of it) that allows for the concept of what I call
"font groups".

"Font groups" are a group of related fonts (hence the name ;) ), and can
maybe also contain other font groups.  Allowing font groups to be
members of other font groups would make them more flexible and more
powerful, while not necessarily making the user interface more
complicated.  An example might be to have both locale-defined and
user-selected fonts in the default font group (see below)

There would be both handpicked and dynamic font groups, where dynamic
means that the contents of that font group are based on a selection rule
that bases on the font metadata (e.g. "all fonts that contain cyrillic
glyphs" or "all fonts of the DejaVu Sans family").

There would also be a "default" font group which contains the fonts that
will be shown in a default font selection dialog or widget.  This
default group could be defined by the current locale (dynamically based
on font metadata and/or a predefined selection for that language).

Font selection widgets and dialogs would have to be changed to add a way
to select another font group, and maybe also a way to edit font groups
(this should be implemented by launching a separate application, to
allow distros and operating systems to implement it "their way").

Also, applications should be able to create their own font groups (e.g.
related to a project) and also use such font groups created by other
applications.  In practice, they would use this to open a font dialog or
font selection widget with another font group than the "default" one.

Font packages could also contain font groups definitions to add to the
system when installing them.  I'm thinking about superfamilies or the
name of a "font collection".


I think ideally the "font group" technology would be implemented in
libfontconfig somehow, and then desktop frameworks & applications should
add support for it.  (Of course that would also require fixing OOo,
Firefox, etc.)

The biggest problem might be to convince all the projects involved to
cooperate on implementing this...   :)


-- 
Jan Claeys