[Gllug] Interesting article on the MS monopoly

[Nix]

On Fri, 16 Apr 2004, Richard Jones stated:
> I don't know if anyone can confirm this, but I discovered by accident
> that these new-fangled apps (Mozilla specifically) don't seem to care
> a jot about the X font system.  Mozilla seems to have its own
> independent method of finding fonts, which means that the range of
> fonts available to it is much larger than those displayed by xfontsel.
> GIMP 1.2, OTOH, seems to only use the ordinary X fonts, and so the
> fonts available for me when I'm playing with GIMP seems to be quite
> limited.  'xterm' similarly.  This has something to do with X core
> fonts vs. X RENDER extension rendered fonts I assume.  Can anyone
> enlighten me?

There are three or four semi-overlapping sets here.

- X core fonts. These are pointed to by the X font path / FontPath
  directives in XF86Config / xorg.conf.

- Xft fonts under fontconfig control. These are pointed to by
  /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and /etc/fonts/local.conf (XML config
  files, *ick*). I'm sure this config file is really useful, but
  the need to read through all that vomit-on-the-screen XML has
  greatly reduced my desire to actually learn what it can do.

- Xft1 fonts: rapidly fading into irrelevance, the path for these
  are described in /etc/X11/XftConfig (written in a peculiar and
  poorly-documented but fairly intuitive config language.)

- Mozilla fonts. Mozilla doesn't use fontconfig: the fonts are
  set by prefs, specifically the `font.directory.truetype.{number}'
  set of prefs. (I've often thought that Mozilla's slogan should
  be `Act different'.)

When that's out of the way you have to consider OOo fonts (which I've
not even thought about trying to tackle: a project whose source tree is
larger than some of my disks is not one I've got time to investigate
much), GhostScript fonts...

... and these all have fairly similar requirements! I mean, I'm willing
to cut TeX and groff some slack: their font systems *must* be arcane,
because they're trying to do so much with them (and because, in TeX's
case, it wasn't originally a Unix program anyway); but mozilla and OOo
don't need that much of font systems: so why do they all act
differently?

*sigh*

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 but merely a lack of adequate backups.' --- Steven McDougall
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