Below are some excerpts from my conversation with the Pango folks. Not the whole conversation, but will hopefully help Juca out a bit with his project.

Gail

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Gail Carmichael <gail.banaszkiewicz@...400...> Date: Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 2:14 PM Subject: Re: CSS fonts only? To: cfynn@...240... Cc: gtk-i18n-list <gtk-i18n-list@...45...>

Thanks for the responses, everyone. I just got into a busy spell at school again, but later on I will need to look into this more. It sounds to me that, basically, we shouldn't be using that PangoFontDescription structure in memory to represent our fonts? Unless that changes (either the options the structure can represent or the fact that Inkscape relies on it so much), we will be stuck with the fonts it can represent. I will probably be back more a bit later to ask questions :)

Gail

Christopher Fynn wrote:

Gail Carmichael wrote:

Hi Christopher (and others)!

Basically what I am saying is that the enumerations defined here http://library.gnome.org/devel/pango/unstable/pango-Fonts.htmlhttp://library.gnome.org/devel/pango/unstable/pango-Fonts.html, like the variant, for example, have a specific subset of values. I just happened to notice that the defined values are pretty much equivalent to allowable CSS text attributes.

In Inkscape, we use the PangoFontDescription pretty extensively. It is how font information is stored in memory while the program is running, for example. The problem is that some fonts have, say, a swash variant, which cannot be described with CSS text attributes, and also cannot be described with any of these enumerations in Pango in terms of the PangoFontDescription. Instead, the regular face of a font family is used (as a default fall-back), and "fancy" fonts are thus not accessible in Inkscape.

Gail

My guess is the best way to handle this w Pango would be through OpenType features & lookups i.e. to include the swash variant glyphs in the base font

and have those accessed through OpenType features and lookups - which could be either contextual or user selected. Having *separate* alternative "fancy" fonts with swash / small caps / etc. fonts is the old way of doing things - if you think about it that way, is much more limited.

For user selected / discretionary OT features the application (Inkscape) would need some kind of interface /menu through which the user could apply the features she wanted to.

WRT CSS - there has been some serious discussion off and on over several years (on the OpenType list, CSS related lists and other places) about specifying - or applying OpenType features through CSS.

regards

- Chris

Hope that clarifies what I am trying to say. It would be cool to pretty much just add more values to the enumerations (and supporting code) so more varieties of fonts could be described. I wanted to know what you guys thought of that possibility - is there some technical or philosophical reason, as can sometimes happen, for not doing so?

Thanks Gail

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