Re: Why dose art not use fontconfig?

[Gregory John Casamento]

> Because art and xlib still have advantages and having them is an added 
> flexibility? 
Although art is an excellent backend, the library it's based on, libart, is 
currently unmaintained, and cairo is actively maintained and more Postscript 
like.    Xlib renders poorly, but is fast on very slow systems.

Yes, both have their advantages. ;)

GJC

--
Gregory Casamento# GNUstep Chief Maintainer

----- Original Message ----
From: Riccardo <multix@ngi.it>
To: Jesse Ross <gnustep@jesseross.com>
Cc: Isaiah Beerbower <public@ipaqah.com>; GNUstep Discuss 
<Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>
Sent: Monday, August 20, 2007 3:12:19 AM
Subject: Re: Why dose art not use fontconfig?

Hi,

On 2007-08-17 18:59:11 +0200 Jesse Ross <gnustep@jesseross.com> wrote:

>> 
>> I agree. While these arguments against using fontconfig are valid, 
>> the
>> mere annoyance of having to create a bundle for each font you want,
>> and not being able to keep all your fonts in one place, out weighs
>> them in my mind.
>> 
>> In short, I think it would be a good idea if the art back end could
>> use fontconfig.

There is an additional reason: Those bundles are very openstepish. 
While I never really figured out the font system on X11 and find 
installation of fonts tedious, on mac you just drop them in to the 
Font folder. Moreover oyu have a system font folder, but also one for 
each user. Nfonts allow this logic and I like that. It is one of the 
few things I like more in art compared to xlib!

> This begs the question -- why make more adjustments to the art  
> backend when 
> Cairo has been blessed as the backend of choice for  future 
> development?
> 
>  From Greg's blog ( 
> http://heronsperch.blogspot.com/2006/12/plans-for- 
> change.html ):

Because art and xlib still have advantages and having them is an added 
flexibility?

>> 5) Focus and concentrate on one and only one set of display  
>> technologies 
>> per platform. We expend way too much time and energy  on maintaining 
>> mulitple backends (xlib, art and etc) when we really  don't have to. 
>> For 
>> Linux/BSD we have two functional backends and  another on the away 
>> for 
>> cairo. What's the point of this? In my  opinion we should complete 
>> the 
>> cairo backend and deprecate BOTH the  xlib and art backends. xlib is 
>> hopelessly outdated and libart isn't  really supported by anyone 
>> anymore.

xlib works very well and has several advantages and it can be made 
pretty fast too as myStep demonstrates. Art has a difference philosphy 
and except for some bugs, it has a very high quality display, but 
clearly slower in some cases. Personally I don't share the idea of 
using cairo as a tool to support different platforms (like windows).

Art has for example that pretty nice font mechanism. What I'd like 
would be a tool that could creeate the nfonts packages in an automated 
and perhaps a visual way, including the name assignment.

Riccardo


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