Re: System fonts

[Fred Kiefer]

MJ Ray wrote:
> "Yen-Ju Chen" <yjchenx@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >  And there is one which use Xft (freetype) and/or fontconfig to draw 
> > character (XftDrawString16).
>
> [...]
>
> >  AntiAlias: YES, FontSet: NO => XftDrawString16(), create font cache if 
> > fontconfig doesn't exist
>
>
> Are you sure about this? I think it's my situation. If I set NSFont to
> "sans" (an alias defined in fonts.conf) then it just can't be found. Why?
> How can I debug this?

My feeling here is that some of the discussion on NSFont implementations 
here is caused by wrong expectations. NSFont, and its backend 
implementations, are there to provide two functionalities. One is 
obvious, visibility of glyphs in the output, eg the computer monitor. 
For the output it surely would be nicer, if every character would be 
displayed indepened of the specified font.
The other functionality seems to be overlooked here, it is that every 
font is able to provide some information about itself, that includes for 
example  the font name, the family, the weight and traits, ascender, 
descender and so on.

The later is only possible if the font restricts itself to a specific 
set of glyphs it is able to display. That is why the specification, and 
most of the implementations in GNUstep, of NSFont is very close to a 
specific font and does not reflect arbitrary defined font sets. To still 
be able to display as many characters as possible on the output device 
the Cocoa specification relies on the method [NSMutableAttributeString 
fixFontAttributeInRange:] to correct the font assigned to a character 
and on the text system, which should generate an exisiting glyph for one 
or multiple characters by selecting an apropriate font.

Some of this is currently missing in GNUstep, which really is a shame 
(and not the great fontconfig implementation in xlib by Derek Zhou). If 
you really need this functionality don't complain about the NSFont 
implementations, sit down and write this missing code.