Re: [matplotlib-devel] STIX fonts

[Darren D. <dar...@co...>]

On Monday 05 November 2007 8:07:04 am you wrote:
> Darren Dale wrote:
> > On Sunday 04 November 2007 8:50:48 am Michael Droettboom wrote:
> >> This is maybe another push in the direction of using fontconfig (which
> >> claims to support otf fonts already).  I'd really prefer to go in that
> >> direction rather than continue to tack on partial reimplementations of
> >> it in font_manager.py -- but it does complicate dependencies on non-X11
> >> platforms).
> >
> > What are the dependency problems? I thought freetype was the only
> > requirement. Incidentally, GIMP uses fontconfig on windows, and they
> > comment at http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/downloads.html: "Contrary
> > to what many seem to think, fontconfig is in no way dependent on X11, so
> > it does make some sense to use it on Windows."
>
> Fontconfig depends on freetype and either expat or libxml2 (expat being
> the easier/lighter dependency).

Oh, your right.

> But the real dependency problem is that on Windows it generally isn't
> already there.  So it would have to be added to the external windows
> dependency zip, and we would probably have to go through a few
> contortions to call it as a commandline tool.

I wonder if that comes with additional overhead.

> If we go the route of 
> wrapping the API (which would be better anyway, since then we could look
> for fonts in our own custom font directory), it would just be like the
> existing dependencies on freetype and libpng.  Not a big deal, really,
> but it adds an additional maintenance burden on those Windows dependencies.
>
> On the Mac, fontconfig appears to be installed as part of Apple's X11
> distribution, but not without it, even though it is useful outside of X11.
>
> So, in case you can't tell, I've long been torn by this -- fontconfig
> solves the font lookup problem in a much more robust way than matplotlib
> will probably ever have the resources to do.  On the other hand, it adds
> complexity to the matplotlib build req's.  Perhaps if there were buy-in
> from some regular Windows and Mac devels to help maintain this going
> forward I wouldn't be so hesitant.

Thanks for explaining. What a headache. I wonder what other cross-platform 
applications and libraries use to deal with fonts, like Qt and OpenOffice. 
Are there native alternatives to fontconfig that are universally installed on 
mac and windows? Or do all these projects have to roll their own solution 
like we do?