Re: font question, xfs locally on cygwin?

[Jon TURNEY <jon dot turney at dronecode dot org dot uk>]

On 17/01/2012 19:58, mathog wrote:
> On 17-Jan-2012 11:07, mathog wrote:
>> Is
>> xfs really needed, or is putting in the right libfreetype bits and
>> pieces enough?  The files that go in
>> /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1 on Mandriva, for instance?

To address some of the questions from your previous email: xfs doesn't
magically make fonts scalable, or know how to read types of font that the X
server itself doesn't (now).

So there is no reason whatsoever to use a local xfs.  The same result can be
achieved (better), simply by adding the same directories to the X server's
fontpath.

There are also some technical difficulties in building xfs for cygwin, due to
libXfont's widespread use of weak symbols.

Furthermore, core (server) fonts are a legacy feature.  All modern toolkits
use Xft (client) fonts. (See [1])

For all of these reasons, we don't provide an xfs.

> So I tried copying the files from Mandriva over and dropping them into the
> Cygwin distro.  That actually worked, in that the fonts then appeared and they
> looked
> good on the screen.  Looks like xfs isn't needed.  However, there was a
> problem with the naming conventions.

> This one works on the Mandriva X11 server
> 
>  -*-courier-medium-r-normal--17-120-*-*-*-iso8859-1
> 
> but it doesn't work on the Cygwin X11 server.  The file name there must be
> 
> -*-courier-medium-r-normal--17-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-13
> The problem seems to be that the font naming convention is slightly
> different.  There
> are 3 fields between 120 and iso8859 on the Mandriva machine, but 4 on
> Cygwin/X.  Change in
> the font naming conventions between different Xorg versions???

These names should be XLFDs (X logical font descriptions [1]).

The first one doesn't look well-formed as it only has 13 fields.

> Which Cygwin package would install /usr/share/fonts/Type1 properly?

I think the fonts we talking about are the so-called 'URW fonts', donated by
the URW foundry to ghostscript.

These are packaged with ghostscript on cygwin, but it doesn't install them in
a place where they can be shared with other uses.

All other things being equal, it would be nice to have these fonts available
to X, although I don't know if it would be better to pick a some other fonts
to be aliased as scalable versions of courier etc.

Also, some investigation would be needed to discover if we should adjust the
ghostscript-fonts-std package, or make a separate package for these fonts for
the X server.

We would also need to make or obtain a suitable fonts.alias to map the font
names to the standard postscript font names (e.g. so URW nimbus mono l can be
accessed by the name courier)

[1] http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xorg-docs/fonts/fonts.html
[2] http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/xorg-docs/specs/XLFD/xlfd.html

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