Re: Font question...

Shaw Terwilliger (sterwill@postman.sourcegear.com)
Thu, 23 Sep 1999 16:25:01 -0500


David Schmitz wrote:
> Shaw Terwilliger wrote:
>
> > It's possible to edit ~/.AbiSuite/AbiWord.Profile to add more paths
> > in which to search for fonts. Be sure that any fonts you add have
> > both a .pfa or .pfb and their .afm files or printing such a document
> > will probably be unsuccessful. AbiWord will look for both these
> > types of files in the same directory in which the fonts.dir is located,
> > even though only the .pfa/.pfb needs to be specified in the
> > fonts.dir.
>
> Hmm, it complains when I don't have a .pfa, and what is the format it's
> looking for in the AbiWord.Profile? I'm assuming that it's looking at
> 'UnixFontPath' setting.

Yeah, now that I look at the file, it seems like the UnixFontPath
setting is always relative to the ABISUITE_HOME environment variable
(set by the wrapper shell script). This wasn't always the case;
when the Type 1 font support was added, it read ABIWORD_FONTPATH
from the environment, but I believe that has been removed now.

You could dig through the prefs code to see how it's loading it.
It shouldn't be too hard to allow more flexibility in the font
path.

> What I'm kinda checking into is having it look at X's different font
> paths and fonts.dir's and then seeing whether or not the type 1 font has
> a .afm file to go along with it. The main problem would be the the
> amount of time for people like me who go a little overboard when they
> install a trillion fonts.

I think that would be a nice feature, but the problem is that X's
font path is not necessarily the application's font path.
When the application is remotely displayed, X font paths won't
always resolve to anything on the client (AbiWord) side. It's
still a problem right now, but can be solved by using AbiWord's
fonts through a font server or by having a local copy.

-- 
Shaw Terwilliger


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