Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering

[Stuart Brorson <sdb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>> If you know of some documentation to the .ttf format, I could knock
>> up a
>> conversion to run based on libgeda reading its own fonts and dumping
>> data.
>
>   I don't know anything about cairo, but the Freetype library makes
> short work of dealing with TrueType fonts.  I'd assume it wouldn't be
> too difficult to use it to generate the glyphs and hand them to the
> cairo subsystem.

Woah, there!

Before you go down that path, please let me remind you that you're
introducing more dependencies into gEDA/gaf which will come back
and bite you on the ****.

I'm not fond of cairo since it's a fast-moving dependency and is not
present on many standard distros.  Also, it's slooooooow on lots of
platforms.  However, as a developer experiment, I figure it's harmless
as long as we also support the same features in GDK, and can turn
cairo off during configure time.  (And it remains off for now.)

As for Freetype, I *strongly* urge you to avoid it since it's also not
present on many (most) Linux distros, and it will also drag in
fontconfig and ${DEITY} knows what other libs.  I've had to deal with
installing Freetype, and they use their own non-standard build system
to build and install the library.  For me, getting their build system
integrated into a larger install was a total nightmare  [1].  Pity the
poor, ignorant user who will be required to install all the garbage
necessary to make Freetype work on his system.

IMO, using yet another external library is not worth the inevitable
support headache just to get some pretty fonts.

Stuart

[1]   The build system works just fine on a stock Linux box if you do
a hand install, but becomes a royal PITA if you try to do anything
more than that.


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