[3844] in Release_7.7_team
MathML fonts
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert A Basch)
Wed May 14 17:07:06 2003
Message-Id: <200305142106.RAA27850@abulia.mit.edu>
To: release-team@mit.edu
Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 17:06:55 -0400
From: Robert A Basch <rbasch@MIT.EDU>
Following up on the discussion in the last meeting on installing fonts
for Mozilla MathML support...
I believe testing has proceeded well enough that we should go ahead and
install the fonts. As we discussed, there are two options:
1) Put the fonts in the release. However, since some of the fonts are
Type 1, this means adding the type1inst utility as a prerequisite, in
order to generate the font directory; type1inst requires pfbtops,
which is part of groff, which we do not have in the Solaris release.
(I have looked at groff enough to determine that adding it would
require a lot of DESTDIR-related modifications to its build system).
So, unless we want to do something gross to create fonts.dir, adding
the fonts to the release will have a substantial cost. (Note that one
MathML font set is the TeX CM fonts, which we actually already have in
the release, as part of tetex, but we would still need to generate the
font directories for these somehow).
2) Put the fonts in the infoagents locker, and modify the mozilla
wrapper to add them to the font path as needed, via "xset fp+ ...".
In addition to the disadvantage of adding the dependency on the
locker, this solution has a problem on Linux -- in the XF86Config-4
file, the loading of the Type 1 handler module (as well as the freetype
module) is currently commented out, thus breaking the ability to add
such fonts via "xset fp+". So we would need to add a hack (presumably
in athena-ws) which uncomments this.
It seems clear that neither option is attractive. I am leaning toward
going with (2), since it seems to involve less pain. I talked to
Andrew about having to modify XF86Config-4, and he was OK with it.
(One could argue that loading the font modules is a generally useful
thing anyway, since users might want to add their own such fonts).
Comments?
