Re: How does Dia determine Font List?

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, Tim Ellis wrote:
> This font issue is getting wierder and wierder.
> 
> How does Dia determine the list of fonts to show?
> 
> The list seems to have no relation at all to the list that GNOME's
> fontsel does. There is no overlap between the Dia font list and
> gfontsel's fontlist.
> 
> It stands to reason that I'd want to choose fonts that I *DO* have on
> my system, but Dia shows only non-existant fonts as options.
> 
> It's as though Dia has hardcoded a list of fonts assumed to exist on
> XFree86 systems...???

Funny you should mention it...

dia-0.90/lib/font.c:
FontData font_data[] = {
  { "Times-Roman",
    "Times-Roman",
    { "-adobe-times-medium-r-normal-*-%d-*-*-*-*-*-*-*",
      NULL
    },
    "Times New Roman", "Regular"
  }, 
  { "Times-Italic",
.
.
.

The list includes the standard list of PostScript fonts, plus a few fonts
in other charsets that are also fairly common in those areas.  This is so
that we can do PostScript printing without embedding all chars as bitmaps
(for that is all you could get from an X font server).

There is in 0.90 experimental support for FreeType fonts, but it's by no
means perfect, and in particular assumes that you have the fonts locally
instead of through a font server.

In the CVS version, as you may see in the archives from a few weeks back,
we have changed to rely on Pango (GTK2) for our font listing, dynamically
adding fonts to the menu as the user selects them.  Much, much better.  But
then, Pango allows us to get the outlines we need to do PostScript
printing (which seems to be the next part up).

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?