I was looking through our fairly large collection of open font bugs and realized that things might be a lot simpler if we took some opinionated positions and just declared certain fonts to be dependencies and expected all packagers to provide them.
This is similar to bundling our own Tahoma, except much less work.
This bug, for instance, prevents Photoshop from working unless there is an Arial font installed: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9623
Wine doesn't seem to respect system-level fontconfig aliases, so even though Liberation Sans is installed on the system Photoshop won't try to use it in place of Arial.
But if however we assumed that Liberation Sans was installed, we could make things much better: a link/substitution for Arial->Liberation Sans could be provided in our own registry (and similarly for Times New Roman and Courier). An alternative is to simply symlink to the Liberation Fonts in /usr/share/wine/fonts as though they were our own shipped fonts (like Tahoma).
This would make Photoshop think Arial was present and keep it functional. Ideally the real Arial would be displayed if it was installed (eg through winetricks corefonts or by installing the distro-provided corefonts package).
A related question is whether to show "Arial" in the list of fonts (eg notepad) when we're actually just providing a substituted Arial. My inclination says no, however I'm not sure how it works internally and what an application would expect.
Thanks, Scott Ritchie
On 3 August 2010 21:57, Scott Ritchie scott@open-vote.org wrote:
This bug, for instance, prevents Photoshop from working unless there is an Arial font installed: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9623 Wine doesn't seem to respect system-level fontconfig aliases, so even though Liberation Sans is installed on the system Photoshop won't try to use it in place of Arial.
This is an excellent idea, except that the Liberation fonts are really horrible. I've *tried* using them for general text use and they make me want to gouge my eyes out.
Is there really no reasonable way to detect the system font settings in GNOME or KDE? And where detection fails, a Wine control panel perhaps?
- d.
On 08/03/2010 03:09 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 3 August 2010 21:57, Scott Ritchie scott@open-vote.org wrote:
This bug, for instance, prevents Photoshop from working unless there is an Arial font installed: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9623 Wine doesn't seem to respect system-level fontconfig aliases, so even though Liberation Sans is installed on the system Photoshop won't try to use it in place of Arial.
This is an excellent idea, except that the Liberation fonts are really horrible. I've *tried* using them for general text use and they make me want to gouge my eyes out.
Is there really no reasonable way to detect the system font settings in GNOME or KDE? And where detection fails, a Wine control panel perhaps?
- d.
Well, if we did use the fontconfig aliases, you'd be seeing the Liberation fonts unless you had the real Arial installed ;)
Thanks, Scott Ritchie
On 08/03/2010 01:57 PM, Scott Ritchie wrote:
I was looking through our fairly large collection of open font bugs and realized that things might be a lot simpler if we took some opinionated positions and just declared certain fonts to be dependencies and expected all packagers to provide them.
This is similar to bundling our own Tahoma, except much less work.
This bug, for instance, prevents Photoshop from working unless there is an Arial font installed: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9623
Wine doesn't seem to respect system-level fontconfig aliases, so even though Liberation Sans is installed on the system Photoshop won't try to use it in place of Arial.
But if however we assumed that Liberation Sans was installed, we could make things much better: a link/substitution for Arial->Liberation Sans could be provided in our own registry (and similarly for Times New Roman and Courier). An alternative is to simply symlink to the Liberation Fonts in /usr/share/wine/fonts as though they were our own shipped fonts (like Tahoma).
This would make Photoshop think Arial was present and keep it functional. Ideally the real Arial would be displayed if it was installed (eg through winetricks corefonts or by installing the distro-provided corefonts package).
A related question is whether to show "Arial" in the list of fonts (eg notepad) when we're actually just providing a substituted Arial. My inclination says no, however I'm not sure how it works internally and what an application would expect.
Assuming for a moment this is a good idea, what's the best implementation? My inclination is to say some registry font links, but I'm not completely familiar with how that works.
Will font links in the registry be ignored when the real font is present?
Thanks, Scott Ritchie
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David Gerard -
Scott Ritchie