Re: [Plplot-devel] gd driver and dlopen() flags

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On Wed, 18 Sep 2002, Andrew Roach wrote:

> The way I originally saw things *ultimately* heading, and it can still be
> subject to change/debate, was to have the font path "searchable" , so
> multiple directories could be specified with the standard path separator[..]
> Is it ':' in unix ?

I think that is an excellent idea so please just go ahead.  In Unix/Linux it
is standard to have colon-separated paths.

Meanwhile, I have good news: your overnight (for me) change to gd.c solved
the colour problem completely.  Also, I have just made a subsequent change
so the path+fontfile name can be 1024 characters as Maurice suggested. So
the only outstanding issue I am aware of is -ori 0.1 (say) works fine for
the Hershey fonts, but does not work for freetype, yet.

> [...]It's very unfortunate that micro$oft took their core fonts of the
web[...]

It does seem to be a somewhat poorly thought-out move by MS.  It hurts their
users, and at the same time doesn't hurt Linux very much at all.  The fonts
were licensed in such a way that anybody could redistribute them freely in
unchanged form so there is at least one project at
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ that is doing exactly that. I suppose
there is a bit of a transition pain for Linux MS font packages to move from
using the MS web server to the new corefonts site, but such package updates
can be done pretty automatically for most distributions.

> [...]
> even more disappointing that there isn't a standard symbol font on linux.
> But don't forget, freetype reads a lot more than just truetype fonts - it
> also does type1, type42 etc... and I think a free type1 symbol font is
> included by adobe in acrobat, so that might be a potential source perhaps ?

No question that fonts on Linux currently have few standards for paths or
file names. Nevertheless, suitable fonts are available on Linux; it is just
a matter of finding them.

From http://freetype.sourceforge.net/freetype2/index.html freetype
apparently supports the following font formats:

TrueType fonts (and collections)
Type 1 fonts
CID-keyed Type 1 fonts
CFF fonts
OpenType fonts (both TrueType and CFF variants)
SFNT-based bitmap fonts
X11 PCF fonts
Windows FNT fonts
BDF fonts (including anti-aliased ones)
PFR fonts
Type42 fonts (limited support)

I had never heard of "X11 PCF" before, but from
http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/pcf-format.html we have the following
definition: "The pcf (portable compiled format) file format is a binary
representation of a bitmap font used by the XServer." So I think that means
freetype has access to *all* bitmap X fonts. For example my
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/ directory is filled with pcf files
including what looks like symbol files. So I forsee lots of interesting
PLplot experimentation with trying out an enormous variety of fonts going
far beyond just the truetype fonts.

Thanks, Andrew, for making this all possible.

Alan