I have some code for the bitmapped font scaling stuff. It has been
sitting idle for two weeks in my tree and I took another look at it
and realised I was doing the wrong tests (close but no banana).
So, I've decided to reopen the debate a little now that I've got a bit
more font knowledge under my belt and here's what I've learned:
Bitmapped font:
-bitstream-charter-medium-r-normal--8-80-75-75-p-45-iso8859-1
Scalable font:
-monotype-times new roman-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
Bitmapped scalable font: (gfontsel says they look like this)
-family-name-medium-r-normal--0-0-75-75-p-0-iso8859-1
I can't seem to find anything on my system that is a bitmapped
scalable font -- at least according to what gfontsel says anyway.
I've looked at a couple of non-XFree86 installations and they don't
seem to have scalable bitmapped fonts either.
As you can see below I also can't tell the difference between an ugly
Type1 font (urw-times) and a pretty TTF font (monotype-times new
roman):
match #12 -urw-times-medium-i-normal--12-120-75-75-p-0-iso8859-1
match #13 -urw-times-medium-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
match #14 -monotype-times new roman-medium-i-normal--12-120-75-75-p-0-iso8859-1
match #15 -monotype-times new roman-medium-i-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
It should also be noted that we get pairs of fonts like 12&13 and
14&15 because of the full font pattern we supply XListFonts with.
If we just supplied "-*" and then regexMatch() we wouldn't see 12 or
14. And 12 & 14 tell us nothing extra about the font. They are based
on the xfs default size settings (in this case 120 at 75dpi) so they
actually tell us about the xfs server configuration.
I have also read a fair bit of the Font-HOWTO and it doesn't really
mention bitmapped scalable fonts -- only mentions bitmapped fonts
(*.pcf or *.bdf). I have plenty of those but they aren't scalable --
or am I missing something? Can we ask X to scale a fixed-sized bitmap
font somehow?
I have a bit more work to do on cleaning up the font code and then
I'll send a patch for inspection that will provide both the option to
resize bitmapped fonts and to enable/disable all font scaling (I just
need to add another(!) lyxrc variable).
In the meantime I would suggest that one thing we could do to stop bad
initial impressions about fonts is to use -*o*-times* instead of
-*-times. This is a fudge to exclude urw fonts and gives preference
to adobe and monotype fonts. Oh and to leave scaling on by default --
I think we currently ship with scaling off.
Allan. (ARRae)
