[RULE] About fonts and standards, was: introduction

[Vadim Plessky]

On Thursday 19 December 2002 07:48, Marco Fioretti wrote:
|  On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 18:06:21 at 06:06:21PM +0300, Vadim Plessky 
 plessky at cnt.ru  wrote:
|  > So, I have a chance to work on fonts & icons (and those are two areas
|  > where Linux/*BSD should improve, IMHO).
|
|  [snip]
|
|  > where I am competent and feel myself "at home". Linux obviously miss
|  > good-quality, *free* fonts, and Linux Desktop can't succeed without such
|  > fonts.
|
|  Agreed! This obviously also makes me ask you: what do you think we
|  should do, from the fonts point of view, to increase speed, reduce
|  RAM needs, and still keep a desktop which, while probably not good
|  looking and flexible as stock KDE/Gnome, is still not a pain to look
|  at, and also easy to live with for users of non english alphabet?


ok, let me answer step by step:

* to increase speed
* to reduce RAM needs, 

>From my experience, rendering of PS Type fonts is faster, comparing to 
TrueType.
No, I don't have numbers to confirm, as you can't really compare apples vs. 
oranges. I just analyuzed about 6 different varainats of Times (Times 
clones), and about 8 variants of Helvetica, to study differences among 
different variants/clones.
And I found that TrueType fonts (or fonts developed with some *aged* 
technologies or delivered from stupid formats, like CG Times or Univers of 
AGFA/CompuGraphic delivered from Intellifont font format) have much more 
nodes than PS Type1 fonts. This is caused by the fact that TT is based on 2nd 
order curves, while PS fonts use 3rd order curves (Bezier splines)
Besides, you may want "to strip" some TT font (like Times New Roman), 
using,say, PfaEdit.
What you need is to load that TTF file into PfaEdit, and save back to TTF.
All TT hints would "stripped", and (most likely) font size decreased.  
Sometimes - by 50%. :-) 
But without those hints, rendering of TTF font would be terrible.

So, if you have limited RAM - you want to avoid TrueType fonts (together with 
Bitmap fonts), as much as posisble.

* keep a desktop good looking and flexible 
("not a pain to look")
Well, you would be surprised, but: you don't need KDE or GNOME (QT or GTK) to 
get nice-looking fonts.
All magic is done in FreeType, and Xft (Xft2) is quite mature technology, 
IMHO.
So, every *pure XFree86* application supporting Xft (RENDER extension is 
required, so XF-4.1.0 or newer is needed) would be able to display TrueType 
and PS Type1 (and OpenType as well) fonts.

If you take widgets/window decorations:  I think the right way to code  Window 
Manager, or Theme Engine, is to use X-level toolkits (not GTK or QT)
At least for users with low memory. But users of latest hardware would 
benefit, too.
Xr/Xc extensions (built on top of Xrender, a.k.a RENDER, extension) are very 
promising. A lot of drawing primitives are already supported, and Xr/Xc 
tarballs are just ... about 50KB in size!  (sources)
NOTE: you would need XFree86 from Rawhide (4.2.99) in order to test those 
extensions

* support users of non english alphabet
This one is tricky.
If you want support for OpenType Layout tables - you need to install 
GTK2+Pango, or Qt3.  Ther eis no other choice left.
There was some work done by Sun, but I doubt size of their library would be 
smaller than Qt or GTK+Pango.
You my want to check XFree86's <fonts> mailing list archives for details of 
Sun announcements.

|
|  I refer to fonts choice and system-wide configuration, choice of good
|  (from this point of view) applications, etc...

system-wide font configuration is done by FontConfig (http;//fontconfig.org)
To get font-management unified (on typical Linux Desktop), you need:
* build XFree86 with FontConfig support (XF-4.2.1 or better 4.2.99 
recommended)
* build Qt 3.1 with FontConfig support, and replace Qt 3.0.5 with Qt 3.1 
(3.0.5 doesn't support Xft2/FontConfig)
* build KDE 3.1 against Qt 3.1
* build GTK2 and GNOME2

--> than, font management on your system would be somewhat unified.
For al other apps: they shoul dbe migrated to FontConfig, so number of fonts 
and choice of thos eones would be the same in all apps.


[...]
|  > I think some of you would be interested to join XDG mailing list
|  > (<xdg-list at freedesktop.org>, archives at:
|  > <https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/xdg-list/> )
|  >
|  > There is a very good, and coinstructive work on that list to make GNOME,
|  > KDE and ROX (file manager) inter-operable.
|  >
|  > I hope Mozilla and OO would start to work togther with XDG guys (which
|  > are developers of GNOME, KDE and ROX), and this would result in better
|  > compatibility, and lower memory usage, for those apps/environments.
|
|  I have started to look into the XDG work, also to prepare the followup
|  to the "Hooray for Bluecurve" article which made us meet. I already
|  knew that ROX supports that, and it was indeed one of the reasons why
|  I did suggest it for RULE. I agree that the freedesktop.org is an
|  excellent way to achieve interoperability even when not using the most
|  popular desktop as they are. As far as OOo and MOzilla are concerned,
|  they do remain a major PITA from that point of view, but probably most
|  of it is due to the fact that they where built to compile also on
|  Windows, and consequently have a *lot* of extra issues to consider.

I think you should consider Galeon2 as important player here, too.
While I don't like Mozilla (and projects delivered from it), when I need 
Mozilla- well, I launch Galeon. ;-))
Galeon for GNOME1 is somewhat outdated (no AA, no FontConfig support, etc.), 
but Galeon2 (for GNOME2) is very promising, from my point of view.
Nautilus (since 2.1.3 release) uses common icon themes (installable via GNOME 
Control Center, not via Preferences dialog in Nautilus), and I think Galeon2 
would do the same (haven't tested)

As there is already common icon theme format for GNOME/KDE (hope ROX would 
pick it up, too), life is becoming better, and (I hope) we would have really 
one icon theme on Linux Desktop, installed by default. Not now, not in 6 
months from now, but one day we would have it!..

Speaking about Mozilla: I haven't tried Phoenix (or how it's called after 0.4 
release?) yet.
Any chance to see support for Common Icon Theme format in Phoenix?  Is someone 
subscribed to Phoenix mailing list, can you ask please?

|
|  	Ciao,
|  		Marco Fioretti
|
|  _______________________________________________
|  Original home page of the RULE project: www.rule-project.org
|  Original Rule Development Site http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/rule/|  
Original RULE mailing list: Rule-list at nongnu.org, hosted at http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rule-list
|  

-- 
Best Regards,

Vadim Plessky
SVG Icons * BlueSphere Icons 0.3.0 released
http://svgicons.sourceforge.net



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