Subject: Re: Unix font warning -- CJK-related...
From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Wed Dec 12 2001 - 16:02:31 CST
Hi Anthony,
> For CJK users with properly configured system, such warning is a false
> alarm. Yes, turning this warning message off in the Preferences dialogue
> would get rid of it, but then AbiWord can't catch real problems then,
> say, after the user upgraded his/her system and something broke.
I accept that it can be a false alarm, not just for CJK users, but for
instance, for all RedHat 7 users. But I would rather issue a false
warning the first time AW is run, then no-warning if one was
needed. We can rephrase and expand the message so that it is
clear that this is a potential problem rather than an existing one,
and expand the instructions in the helpfile.
To the pseudocode: my concern about merely the contents of the
fonts.dir file under the CJK locales is that it does not guarantee
that the fonts are in the path, it only makes it probable, i.e., there
is a possibility that there could be a problem, and by warning the
user, we avoid panic if there is. Even if the possibility is small, I
would still prefer erring on the side of caution, because our
experience shows that very few users can deal with the situation
when it does not work.
Now, I agree that the present way it works is not 100%
satisfactory; if you can come up with a solution that will make it
possible to ascertain that the fonts we need are available, and even
better one that would work for non-CJK locales too, then I would be
more than happy to comit it, because I do not like popping false
warnings either.
> It would be ideal if this warning message could show _which_ fontpath
> is causing the error. Is it an easy thing to do? :-)
> (I didn't examine the source code in detail.)
That is not that easy -- we could dump the whole of the original font
path, and we could print the offending entry if we detected it
ourselves, but if the problem is that some of the directories contain
fonts that the X server does not support, we have no way of telling
which directory it is, and I am not sure that this information would
be particularly useful to the user. I think improving the instructions
what to do when this appears is a better alternative. The procedure
is like this:
(1) Ignore the warning, and if things work fine, just turn it off in the
preferences.
(2) If there is problem with the fonts do this ....
I appreciate your feedback and contributions.
With regards
Tomas
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