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Fonts have been around for quite some time. Even TrueType fonts have been
an everyday part of people's lives for a great many years now. Why is
it, exactly, that I can't get my programs to use all of the fonts on my
computer?
Well, X is broken. X likes to deal with strict bitmap fonts. None of
that scalable, TrueType, stuff. No, that's too newfangled for X. People
used to work around this by making font servers that took scalable fonts,
prescaled them for common sizes, and pretended to the X server that they
were bitmaps. Which worked, more or less, though you still had to deal
with X's wonderful font naming scheme.
Then came XFree86 4.<mumble>. "Oh," said they, "It supports scalable
fonts natively now. No need for those nasty font servers." Well, that's
a lie hidden inside a truth. They wrote an extension for X that supports
scalable and other sorts of fonts. Who uses this extension? Well, GTK
2.2. And maybe KDE. And approximately no one else in the universe.
Probably because it's only in XFree86. (But "will hopefully be included
by [other X11 implementations] in the future.")
My needs are simple. I want TrueType fonts in Mozilla. Mozilla says it
supports TrueType fonts. Surely that means it's brave and daring and uses
the new Xft extension, right? No, of course not. The wise Mozilla
developers decided that it would be better to build TrueType support
*right into Mozilla*, so you have to go out of your way and make sure
Mozilla knows where your TrueType fonts are. It can't figure this out on
its own; it has to be told.
Why can't there be one solution that works well and everyone uses so end
users don't have to worry about stuff like this. Font support should be
something that just works. Yeah, it's probably more likely that everyone
will magically decide to standardize on a single widget toolkit.
--
...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/
PGP: 026A27F2 print: D200 5BDB FC4B B24A 9248 9F7A 4322 2D22 026A 27F2
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I never understood people who don't have bookshelves.
-- George Plimpton
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