Identifying remaining core font users

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 04:41:32PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> It seems the people maintaining text libs are not interested in backends
> that fail if you use codepoints outside a specific encoding, or when you
> use the "wrong" font (because encoding is just one part that changed,
> OpenType "smart" features such as ligatures and swashes mean that even
> if you restrict yourself to basic latin nowadays a modern font won't
> behave like a "simple" ASCII font used to ten years ago). Probably
> because they know that if they limited themselves users would ask for
> the missing bits anyway.
> 
> Projects that find modern text libs over-complex should try to maintain
> their own "simple" alternative (or pick up the maintenance of the X11
> Core fonts system). I suspect they'd quickly find themselves in
> agreement with current text lib maintainers.
> 
> So really, it's just a matter of delegation: if you don't want to
> maintain your own text stack, follow the advice of the people
> maintaining the one you use, and the advice of X11 Core fonts
> maintainers (back when there were still some, in 2003) was clear: drop
> it and use fontconfig instead.

Yes ... but ...  we're talking mainly about demos and examples written
for beginners.

------------------------------------------------------- hello.ml --
#!/usr/bin/ocamlrun ocaml

#load "graphics.cma";;
open Graphics

let () =
  open_graph " 200x150";
  set_font "-*-times-*-r-*-*-*-240-*-*-*-*-*-*";
  auto_synchronize false;
  while true do
    let x, y = ref 50, ref 80 in
    List.iter (
      fun c ->
	moveto !x !y;
	let rand () = Random.int 256 in
	set_color (rgb (rand ()) (rand ()) (rand ()));
	draw_char c;
	x := !x + 24;
	if c = ' ' then (y := !y - 24; x := 50)
    ) [ 'H'; 'E'; 'L'; 'L'; 'O'; ' '; 'W'; 'O'; 'R'; 'L'; 'D'; '!' ];
    synchronize ()
  done
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Rich.

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