Gentoo Archives: gentoo-desktop-research

From: dams@×××.fr
To: gentoo-desktop-research@g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-desktop-research] One research problem we could research
Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2003 14:06:48
Message-Id: m24qyilczl.fsf@krotkine.idm.fr
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-desktop-research] One research problem we could research by foser
1 foser <foser@g.o> said:
2
3 > On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 15:22, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
4 >> If that is the only way then we might come to the conclusion that the best
5 >> solution is to wait. I do think though that at least good documentation might
6 >> be another solution.
7 >
8 > Documenting fonts is like setting defaults : a disaster, what you like
9 > on your monitor looks pretty bad on another persons LCD, etc. It's so
10 > much a personal thing that setting up defaults will always upset some
11 > users. And should such a document support legacy font support (xfs, xft1
12 > etc. ?). I guess one could set up a document describing what is possible
13 > in configuring xft2/fontconfig.
14
15 If I see correctly, the things that makes ugly fonts :
16
17 - bad looking fonts
18 - missing fonts (so it uses not suited ones)
19 - badly configured xft*/fontconfig
20 - software not using last freetype/xft ...
21
22 ( feel free to add reasons if I missed som)
23
24 So, to clarify, we could :
25 - run some test to see if fonts are ugly in common use in different languages
26 (I'll do some test cause I have a fresh gentoo)
27 - go through default available fonts (after having emerged kde and gnome), and
28 list the ugliest ones
29 - check the fontconfig, xft configurations
30 - list known software that doesn't use the good font systems.
31
32 Whith that done we'll be able to see where the problems are, wnd decide if we
33 want to :
34 - wait
35 - try to get new fonts (many additional set of fonts by default)
36 - change font configuration
37 - change software so that they use latest technology (I have seen in the past
38 some patchs to make this and that use freetype2, I think OpenOffice had such a
39 patch, but I thougt it was in the main now)
40
41 In addition, we can think of making font managment easy for the user. (I wrote
42 the font managment tool for mandrakeLinux, he had some working features, but
43 uses old font tools).
44
45 >> I did not mean to be western-centered. I was suggesting that we look into
46 >> improving the fonts. I don't want non-western fonts to be looking worse
47 >> because of it. Actually did you try sometime to run konsole with
48 >> LC_CTYPE="zh_CN", it is really ugly, and it should be possible to fix this.
49 >
50 > My point more is that if you set it up for latin charset users (what we
51 > obviously would do) you might make mistakes you aren't even aware of. It
52 > needs to be coordinated with asian,arabic,hebrew devs/users for as far
53 > we have them. There already has been some discussion on setting this up
54 > in a configurable fashion for different charsets, but that needs the
55 > improved fontconfig.
56
57 btw do we have i18n/fonts gurus @ gentoo?
58
59 >
60 >> > You should install exactly the same fonts to have the same effect and
61 >> > thats also a question of installing windows fonts or not. KDE just has
62 >> > bad font defaults, helvetica everywhere is just a bad choice. Current
63 >> > fontconfig setups should solve most of these problems afaik.
64 >> >
65 >>
66 >> I agree that helvetica is a bad choice, but we might look into making
67 >> helvetica look not too bad at least in some cases
68 >
69 > The problem usually is that it uses the the standard xfree bitmap stuff,
70 > you can't make that look good. Just use fontconfig identifiers like
71 > 'sans' for fonts. That should also make the looks of GTK+ and QT apps
72 > more alike (for as far this doesn't happen already, been a while since i
73 > did a KDE install).
74 >
75 >> > afaik OO uses its own (outdated?) freetype etc. Do from source ebuilds
76 >> > have these problems too ? They could use the system libs and settings.
77 >>
78 >> I always use from source openoffice. I don't perceive any font problems. In
79 >> the from-source version we do indeed use the latest freetype.
80 >
81 > But not the system one (yes im too lazy to look at ebuilds atm ;)) ? If
82 > there's no real good reason for that, it should be changed.
83
84 grepping the ebuild shows :
85
86 # Enable Bytecode Interpreter for freetype ...
87 append-flags "-DTT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER"
88
89 and in the SRC_URI there is a
90 mirror://sourceforge/freetype/freetype-${FT_VER}.tar.bz2"
91
92 --
93 dams
94
95 --
96 gentoo-desktop-research@g.o mailing list

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