Identifying remaining core font users

Nicolas Mailhot nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net
Wed Nov 11 15:41:32 UTC 2009


Le mercredi 11 novembre 2009 à 14:32 +0000, Richard W.M. Jones a écrit :

> I emailed him.
> 
> It has to be said that maybe text in the OCaml Graphics module only
> works right now for people using "fixed" in a ISO-8859-1 locale or
> whatever [in reality, it works for a whole lot more than that], but
> ripping out text support means it won't work for anyone at all.

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.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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