Re: Fonts for the backend

[Thomas Weber]

On 25/06/08 06:21 +0300, Shai Ayal wrote:
> While windows and OSX come with a core set of fonts that are assured
> to be in all systems, linux has no such feature. Moreover, I am not a
> font expert but I'm not sure the core fonts available in other systems
> are adequate for our needs. Also, I'm not sure how to test for font
> existence in the configure script.

What type of fonts do you need? Truetype?

> My solution in octplot was to include a set of 4 core fonts
> (Helvetica, Times, Courier, Symbol) in the distribution
> 
> The pros:
> A known set of core fonts
> the URW fonts are metric-compatible with the core postscript fonts, so
> screen & postscript/pdf fonts look similar
> No need to do system specific searches for fonts
 
> The cons:
> adds ~150K per font to the distro
I guess I can live with that.

> most linux systems probably have these fonts installed somewhere
Distributions will strip them out, nothing to worry about[1]. People
compiling from source are probably best of with a known good start.

> maintain the fonts
Is this so much work? I really don't have a clue, but I'd say that the
above fonts are pretty stable, aren't they?

[1] Not sure if that actually works that way, but if something like 
$./configure --font-path=/usr/share/fonts/truetype 
worked, that would be cool.

        Thomas