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

[Marc J. Driftmeyer]

Not a problem. Whatever makes Lenny become FCS [NeXT lingo] or  
GoldMaster all the better.

- Marc

Marc J. Driftmeyer
mjd at reanimality.com
http://www.reanimality.com
(509)435-5212

On Aug 15, 2008, at 2:40 PM, Yavor Doganov wrote:

> 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.