Subject: Re: Unix font warning -- CJK-related...
From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Wed Dec 12 2001 - 13:07:19 CST
> > The problem with the patch is that it merely bypasses the warning,
> > which is there for a reason -- it is to alert the user to the fact that
> > some manual ajustment of the system might be required before
> > AW is usable.
>
> That sounds reasonable from the point of view of developers and experienced
> users, but not for new Linux users, especially when the CJK TrueType fonts
> are already in X fontpaths (pre-configured by Linux distribution vendors/
> developers), and AbiWord works perfectly, and yet it keeps popping up that
> warning message on startup.
It keeps popping up that message as long as the user ignores it,
and that is healthy, because the message is, irrespective of the
system configuration, an indication of AW having a problem. Once
the user looks up the section in the helpfile to which this
messages points, he or she will know that this message can be
turned off in the Preferences dialogue, and need not to see it ever
again.
> AbiWord 0.9.4.1 didn't such warning message.
AbiWord < 0.9.5 set the font path from a wrapper script, which was
a source of constant complaints from the users. The biggest
problem with the script was that when the xset +fp call in it failed,
it issued no warning, instead as soon as AW loaded it popped up
the infamous message about "Times New Roman ...", or in the
worse case, gtk terminated us with Gtk-ERROR 86.
> This warning message has
> puzzled me ever since 0.9.5 came out. It wasn't apparent from the
> warning message why exact AbiWord is complaining -- it just says it
> couldn't add its fontpaths to X...
The three dots are the root of the problem here, and a user who will
not finish reading it will see it every time they start AW :-).
> Yes: the situation on Thiz Linux and just about all other Linux
> distributions are as follows:
Not only we cannot assume that all Linux distributions are the
same (I might want to run a CJK version of AW on my SuSE 6.3
machine, on which virtually nothing of the original setup remains),
but we also run on a variety of other Unices, not just Linux.
The one problem with the warning I can see is that at the moment
it cannot be localised because the font manager gets initialized
before the stringset is loaded -- I need to have a look whether this
could be changed.
Tomas
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Wed Dec 12 2001 - 13:09:00 CST