[Pkg-fonts-devel] Fwd: Draining the font swamp

Angus Lees guslees at gmail.com
Mon May 28 09:55:21 BST 2007


On 5/24/07, "Arne Götje (高盛華)" <arne at linux.org.tw> wrote:
>
> Currently fontconfig's decision on which font to use for a specific
> glyph is influenced by the following:
> * which charsets the font package has registered in defoma. If the font
> has registered itself for ISO8859-1, fontconfig will consider the font
> suitable for that codepoint range. Same is true for all other charsets.


minor correction: fontconfig makes its own charset coverage determination -
defoma merely symlinks fonts into a place fontconfig can find them.  (and
builds alias lists, etc based on defoma information)


> - Whether we need DeFoMa
>
> Yes, as legacy X, GTK1 and QT apps depend on it.
> Fontconfig also uses the settings to determine the character sets
> provided by the fonts.
> AFAIK, it is also used to register fonts for ghostscript... however I'm
> not an expert on this and it seems to me that it does not always work as
> planned.


Yes, defoma still registers fonts with ghostscript.   In this day and age
though, if you forget to embed your fonts into your postscript doc you're
probably already doing something wrong (and the few bug reports I've
investigated re defoma/ghostscript font handling have really been bugs in
the postscript producer).

(There's a whole bunch of defoma machinery for supporting the fonts in your
printer - and also for tracking an X11 equivalent font to use when rendering
printable docs on-screen.  These are (dubious) reasons to still have the
ghostscript defoma script)

-- 
- Gus
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