Re: [GD-DEVEL] Re: gd2 & fontconfig/freetype fail to find fonts on Mac OS X (macports)

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 22:46, Ethan Merritt wrote:
> On Monday 13 April 2009 13:21:40 you wrote:
>> What happens if you change the source code in gdft.c inside gd
>> library?
>
> Yes, that works.
> But even if the next libgd release contains this fix, it will take some
> time to propagate to everyone's installed machines.

Though it will take some time before gnuplot propagates to everyone's
machine as well :(

I don't know how you handle dependencies on new versions of libraries,
but I would suggest to fix as soon as the fixed version of gd comes
out. It will take a while before next gnuplot version/patchset comes
out anyway and those who work with cvs version should know how to help
themselves (not always true, but people using cvs version should be
prepared for occasional problems at least).

If I understand it properly, one is unable to use fonts with full path
names if you call the buggy gdFTUseFontConfig at least once? (The bad
news is that this used to be the only method to use any font in past.)

May I suggest at least something not-so-related? The message
   Could not find/open font when opening font "arial", using internal
non-scalable font
is a bit annoying, pops up everywhere (at the moment) and doesn't tell
anything useful to the user. I suggest rewriting the message and
stating that one could try to set GDFONTPATH manually. (It took me a
while to figure that out.)

On the other hand, gnuplot could also provide feedback like "GD
library has no fontconfig support, you can set GDFONTPATH manually.
Using internal non-scalable font."

(Just saying that "arial" could not be found is far from helpful and
it's particularly annoying for newbie users since it pops up every
time "by default" ... well, at least annoying enough that I was ready
to learn some gd basics :) :)

Mojca

PS: I agree with the one who mentioned it that there also needs to be
a way to request the default (build-in) font even if arial starts
working out-of-the-box.