Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 12:40 -0400, 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 ****.
> 
> 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.)

Cairo is present on all distros which support Gnome since 2005/2006. It
is improving fast, but hasn't yet (to my knowledge) broken its API/ABI,
so its not a pain (like Guile) to depend against. I realise that the
userfont stuff won't be present until cairo 1.8, and that is a pain.

> 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.

I thought Freetype is quite common*, and it might even be possible to
cut-paste bits from it.

For most users, apt-get, rpm, yum, yast, portage, ports(?) will allow
them to install this without manually compiling from source.

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

Since GTK2.8, users already have cairo of some version, so it should be
no harm there.

Peter

*Our definitions of common may be slightly disparate, if you're finding
boxen without cairo.




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