Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering

[Dave McGuire <mcguire@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On May 5, 2008, at 12:40 PM, Stuart Brorson wrote:
>>> 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 ****.

   Oh nono, hang on...*I* am not introducing any dependencies at  
all.  In fact, I'm still trying to get cairo itself built so I can  
try Pete's new code, but cairo seems to be yet another "all the  
world's a PC running Linux" library.  At least Freetype is reasonably  
portable. ;)

> I'm not fond of cairo since it's a fast-moving dependency and is not
> present on many standard distros.

   Well, these days, some "standard distros" (assuming you mean  
Linux) don't even include a C compiler, so..

>   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.

   Well, I'm with you there, at least in principle.  I'm looking at  
probably a day or two of work just to try the cairo code, starting  
with getting git built (whose idea was that again?!), and it seems  
cairo has its own nice little tree of dependencies.  I'm stuck on  
pixman at the moment.

   Personally, I've wanted to write freetype support for PCB (not  
gschem) for several years now, but I've not had the time to hack on  
it.  That's one area where it could be very useful.

           -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL




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