So as some of you already know, we will be storing more complete font information in the style string so that Inkscape can (eventually) do more than what CSS can represent. However. we need to carefully choose exactly what this information will be.

It was suggested previously that we use the system font name, which I was going to use pango to retrieve (http://www.gtk.org/api/2.6/pango/pango-Fonts.html#pango-font-description-to-...). However, this function produces almost the same answer as pango_font_description_to_string(), so it's probably just as easy to use that function. I believe this could be reasonable if we trust that pango will not change how this is written (because if they do, we have to make a font-specification-v2 or something).

There is another disadvantage: Pango doesn't support anything that CSS doesn't. For quite a long time I thought I could get around this because when pango finds fonts on the system, I was able to print out the information about even the non-CSS styles. Unfortunately, we are currently very dependent on the PangoFontDescription structure, and once this structure is obtained from this point on, we lose all non-CSS information. There are two things I would like to look into in the future: first, whether we can around this super-dependence on that structure and could use instead somehow the PangoFontFace structure that seems to contain all needed information; and second, perhaps contributing to pango and/or finding out why they don't have more general font support.

Anyway, so the reason for this email is to get some of your ideas on what you think we should put into font-specification. Tell me why too!

Thanks, Gail