[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Re: Font configuration

[Stanislav Tsekhmistroh]

Hubert Chan wrote:

> 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/>.)

I will test this, thank you.

> 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?
> 

I agree that defoma script would be the best solution at this stage,
since this is the only way to unify font usage for Debian.

Regretfully, there are another ways of doing this in another Linuxes
and *nixes. So this problem should be solved N times for N different distros.