This is the only (only) way you'll ever get WYSIWYG fonts
between X and any printed output. X doesn't supply any mechanisms
for mapping, translating, or even measuring fonts meant to be
printed--X was written to solve the font display problems of
1988, not the printing problems. It's really up to an application
to deal with printed output, and since X doesn't provide enough
information (in the form of vector data or complete metrics for
things like kerning), having local access to real fonts which
(1) can be parsed by the app and (2) read through X for
display speed, is the only method that comes to mind.
Since PostScript has become much the standard page description
language for Unix applications, and since X11R5 and newer include
a PostScript Type1 rasterizer, Type1 fonts in a directory
common to the X server and the application works "well."
> 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.
You could set up a font server on the machine hosting the AbiWord
executables and fonts, and simply point the X servers to the
font server there. You could also distribute the fonts to the
X server machines that need them... I understand that some of
these displays are diskless X stations. In those situations,
the font server seems the obvious solution.
Am I missing something really obvious in this layout? The X
font server was built do handle just this situation.
xfs should ship with X11R6 and later.
> 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.
Where is the GPLed source code to these applications? We don't have the
option of requiring proprietary code in our application, nor would
we ever want to.
> 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?
I agree it's a mess, but the only thing that can be done
is to extend X to pass real vector data and advanced font metric
information to applications. Doing such an extention would
take an extraordinary amount of time to get adopted, and
we would lock out those customers who can't easily re-compile
an X server to use these extensions. I see how our current
scheme is inconvenient, but I consider rebuilding X (or adopting
an add-on extension library) even more so.
Fonts just suck through X, and this is the only way I see
that we can guarantee the availability of fonts through
X, raw font data, and raw font metrics. But if anyone else
has solutions that could be done openly and freely, please speak
up.
-- Shaw Terwilliger