Thoughts on font management

[Isaiah Beerbower]

Hello all,

A while back there was some discussion about the way GNUstep handles
fonts. The two ways discussed were nfont bundles and fontconfig. I
like nfonts because they give you more control over how your fonts are
organized, but I also like the fontconfig method because it makes font
installation easier for fonts which don't need to be organized beyond
the computers knowhow. I would like to propose a new method  which
gives both advantages.

If we used a GNUstep maintained font index plist as our only cache and
used fontconfig + FreeType for retrieving information from font files
except when we come across an nfont (in which case we would read its
plist) we would receive many advantages from both sides:

* Those who want to distribute a font family in a pre-organized way
can do so using an nfont.

* Those who don't, won't have to do anything.

* Those who want to keep their fonts organized a specific way can
either put them all into nfonts, or change values in the font index.

* Those who don't care aren't bothered.

* GNUstep gets to choose which folders get indexed.

We can also put other information in the index (if we want) such as
wether an installed font is enabled or not.

The index I am envisioning at this point would be a plist with an
array of dictionaries, each dictionary holding the path to a font
file, the file's last modification date, the font's family name,
postscript name, style, whether it should use anti-aliasing or not,
etc., etc..

I would like this for cairo, but if it can be coded once then used in
art also, that would be great to.

I'm ready to implement such a thing if acceptable.