[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Re: Font configuration

[Hubert Chan]

On Mon, 20 Feb 2006 16:49:39 +0200, Stanislav Tsekhmistroh said:

> I've digged a little the TextEdit.app and the way it prints RTF. And
> it seemed to me that font configuration is not fully correct according
> to defoma. I mean that PostScript font names are not correct. As a
> result -- PS output from TextEdit uses wrong fonts.

[...]

I need a little advice on this.

I've changed the PostScript names in the Vera and Free* .nfont files
provided with gnustep-back on my system, and printing does seem to work
better -- at least Ghostscript shows the right fonts now.

But now the defaults database needs to be changed, since it references
the fonts by PostScript name, which are now changed, and so all the
fonts revert to the ugly defaults instead of the nice Vera fonts until I
change the defaults.  (If you want to see what I mean, and you've
changed your default fonts to the Vera fonts, install the
gnustep-back-common deb package from
<http://www.uhoreg.ca/programming/debian/gnustep/packages/gnustep-back/>.)

But it seems like the printing problem is really a problem with how
GNUstep generates the PS file: it should be embedding the font into the
PS file, instead of just referencing it by name -- otherwise, when you
send it to a PostScript printer, it will print incorrectly anyways.  So
printing in GNUstep needs to be fixed anyways, and when it's fixed, this
problem should no longer be a problem.

So what I'm thinking of doing is this: we should accept that printing in
GNUstep is currently borked, and I'll leave the included .nfont files
the way they are.  With the new defoma script, it will generate another
set of .nfont files anyways for the Vera and Free* fonts with the defoma
PostScript names, so I'll change the instructions in the README.Debian
in gnustep-back to refer to the defoma PostScript names instead of the
old PostScript names, and I'll add a NEWS.Debian saying that the old
names are deprecated, and that if users want printing to work better,
they should use the new PostScript names in their defaults.  And
eventually (after the next Debian release), I'll remove the included
.nfont files in favour of the files generated by the defoma script.

I think that's the best solution.  Any comments?

-- 
Hubert Chan <hubert at uhoreg.ca> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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