This is bad. I understand that a one computer desktop is your primary target,
but this is not what Unix and X is all about. As a side note, AbiWord 0.3.2
builds and runs on Solaris 7 with GTK+ 1.1.14. It needs just a little bit of
tweaking, but not much.
I have a host with 11000 users. Some of them are not in the same city, but
they can use X programs, because there are ATM lines between us and none
of them expiriences slow down due to a network latency. However, AbiWord
would probably became unusable for them if the new font scheme becomes
adopted.
Some time ago I installed StarOffice on a Solaris server. I was using Linux
as an X terminal and it failed to work correctly because of font issues.
StarWriter also comes with its own fonts, which get installed somewhere
(the package didn't think it was important to notify me about it during the
installation procedure). I clicked on help and it opened help document
which was mostly blank, because my font server didn't have appropriate
fonts, so my X server couldn't load them. This is a situation where X server
is on one host, application on another and font server on the third one.
That's not uncommon at all. And printer is, of course, another network device.
Font handling in X has one big problem. There is no way for an application
to request fonts in vector format from a font server. All you can get is
a bitmap for the specified size. However, there are commercial packages
which solve this problem. I don't remember exactly, but I think that font
server included in Applixware has this ability. It was licenced from a
company whose name I forgot, but they wrote an extension for X protocol
which allows applications to get fonts in vector format. So, I think
that free font servers (like fsft, fstt & others) should implement this
extension and AbiWord and all other applications should use it.
Currently all applications which need vector fonts bring their own tarball
with them. So I have several system directories with fonts, Adobe's Acrobat
reader has its own directory, Ghostscript has its own fonts, StarOffice wanted
the same, but I deleted it a long time ago...
This is a mess and something should be done about it. I think that IRIX has
some kind of font registry, but I don't have an access to IRIX systems.
If somebody works on IRIX, could we have a report about font issues?
--
.-. .-. Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
(_ \ / _)
| dave@srce.hr
| dave@fly.cc.fer.hr