This would be a great feature, but the problem of supporting TrueType
fonts is much deeper than just AbiWord. X11R6 doesn't natively
support TrueType format fonts, although several font servers exist
to export X fonts from TrueType files.
X's font model (through Xlib) is pretty weak; the metrics exposed
for each font aren't sufficient to do real typographical work
with them. They're fine for displaying, but we can't actually
get the right print metrics. This is for the reason that X is a
display server and not a print server.
If we have the TrueType fonts local to the AbiWord client application,
we could parse the TrueType fonts to get their real metrics. We
then have a problem embedding these fonts in our printed documents.
I don't know of a Unix TrueType printing solution which will
embed the font data in the printed document (to get the exact
font). PostScript does allows this embedding but only if you use
a PostScript Type 1 (and other Type [X] fonts). PostScript is
the standard output method on Unix and Unix-like machines.
AbiWord has the requirement that Type 1 fonts be available both
through the X server and through the filesystem local to the
client process. This way AbiWord can do fast drawing (through the
X server) and embedded font printing (reading the contents of the
font file).
It's possible that at some time in the future we may have someone
contribute code to allow AbiWord to do some decent font matching
to TrueType or X bitmap display fonts. This would allow the user
to use any font available through X to type a document, and then
print to PostScript and get a font pretty close to the one on screen.
Right now it's actually the same font data on screen and printed.
-- Shaw Terwilliger