[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Bug#494933: Bug#494933: charmap.app: the range switching is terribly slow

[Yavor Doganov]

Marc J. Driftmeyer wrote:
> 
> I'm all for Defoma making a unified, system-wide approach to Font  
> management for Debian, but I'm more in favor of Freetype working with  
> fontconfig and making these fonts 'just work' ala NeXTSTEP/Openstep  
> [Display Postscript was a godsend working at NeXT] 

That was the idea behind the GNUstep <-> defoma integration, and I
think it worked pretty well apart from this major glitch we're facing
now.  TTBOMK, no other distro makes such an effort; if you install
GNUstep you're more or less fontless, and you have to convert manually
fonts with the `mknfonts' tool.

> but I'd really be interested in all these fonts working with
> LaTeX/XeTeX/TeX via the projects currently being done at Google SoC
> on XeTeX and Unicode font support directly into such a
> pain-in-the-ass but we love it's final product font-handling that is
> TeX.

I can't comment on that, but probably others on the list can.

>   I do know we have the backend of freetype and the xml based  
> fontconfig, then we have type1/opentype/truetype all managed by  
> freetype but not system managed I'm to ascertain by fontconfig for  
> GNUstep and therefore we use Defoma for this?

The Cairo backend uses the fonts registered with fontconfig directly,
discovering them by direct library function calls.  The art backend
expects all fonts to be available in the nsfont format, and this is
basically what the defoma integration entails -- upon installation or
upgrade, it discovers all possible system fonts (not only truetype)
and makes them available in the format GNUstep understands.

But I might be wrong about the precise order or implementation of the
mechanism; Hubert knows most about GNUstep and the interaction with X
and the font system, so he should be able to comment more precisely.

Anyway, there's surely at least two bugs here, and depending on what
we discover one or all of them may be release-critical.  So I'd
suggest that we concentrate on fixing them, and discuss general issues
later.  They might be closely related, but Lenny is close to release
and we don't want problems like Michal's.