[5577] in testers
Re: gome terminal solaris font lossage
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Thu Jun 26 17:08:17 2003
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Angie Kelic <sly@MIT.EDU>
Cc: testers@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33L.0306260210050.26784-100000@nighthawk.mit.edu>
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Date: 26 Jun 2003 17:03:42 -0400
On Thu, 2003-06-26 at 02:15, Angie Kelic wrote:
> A large selection of fonts (for example "fixed" and "miscfixed")
> that used to be available in gnome-terminal under 9.1 solaris are no
> longer available under 9.2 solaris. These fonts are still available
> under 9.2 linux.
There is little relationship between the naming and configuration of
fonts between 9.1 and 9.2, although the actual fonts used are somewhat
similar.
Unfortunately, they are not as similar as they should be, because
fontconfig can't understand compressed fonts, so on Solaris it only
winds up pulling fonts from the Type1 and TrueType directories. The
same problem would occur on Linux, except that Red Hat introduces the
redundant bitmap-fonts package, which contains an uncompressed set of
selected X11R6 font files in /usr/share/fonts.
The "miscfixed" name in particular is a little puzzling. It appears
that Red Hat's bitmap-fonts package deliberately changes the family name
of the -misc-fixed fonts from "fixed" to "miscfixed", for reasons I
can't determine. However, that package also a "console9x15" font of
unknown origin with the font family "fixed" (which is weird, since
console8x8 and console8x16 have the font family "console"), so the font
properties dialog also shows users a "fixed" font family with exactly
one size available. (The user can choose many sizes in the dialog, but
they have no effect on the resulting font.)
The problems I see are:
* The two platforms are offering a completely non-overlapping set of
fonts (I believe), although they do have overlapping names. So user
font configurations don't mesh well between the platforms.
* On Solaris, the set of monospace fonts offered is a bit weak, partly
because the compressed bitmap fonts are not being read. (However,
empirically, even if all the fonts are available, the default monospace
font is pulled from TrueType/CourierNew.ttf, which looks pretty ugly.)
* On Linux, there is at least one obvious wrinkle in the set of fonts
offered to the user. (There is also a lot of redundancy, but that
appears to be by design.)
The options I can see are:
1. Do nothing. The problems are irritating, but not catastrophic.
2. Make an uncompressed copy of the Solaris fixed fonts and point
fontconfig at it. I don't like this option because it wouldn't improve
per-platform consistency (the fixed fonts would be available under
"fixed" on Solaris and "miscfixed" on Linux), and it wouldn't help the
default monospace font.
3. Grab the collection of Linux fonts used by fontconfig, install it
under Solaris, and point fontconfig there. This solves the platform
consistency issue and the "Solaris monospace fonts are ugly" issue,
although it doesn't solve the "Linux fonts are buggy" issue. The main
problem with this option is that we have to remember to redo it with
every release or we'll get drift.
4. Make our own collection of fonts and install them on both
platforms. Seize control of fonts.conf on Linux and point it at only
our collection of fonts. This lets us solve all of the problems, but is
way too much effort.
Right now I favor option 3, but I still reserve the right to pick option
1 as long as I feel sort of bad about it.
