Rev/Linux update - for Richmond

[Richard Gaskin]

I got another update this morning from the team on the progress of the 
Rev engine for Linux, and this one's for Richmond:

<http://fourthworldlabs.com/rev/fontimprove.PNG>

With the screenshot Mark Waddingham noted:

    To be fair, the visual difference for roman text is mostly nil
    (or at least will be when I've fixed the slight difference in
    baselines that seems to have crept in).

    The linux engine now uses 'pango' to do all its text rendering
    and font selection/listing - this is the modern approach and
    means if you install fonts via GTK/Gnome/Fontconfig etc. you
    actually see them listed in Rev and will be used when requested.

    In addition, all the font fallback and such works correctly
    both for unicode text and all the config that distros have
    invested in 'fontconfig'. The latter, in particular, means you
    get sensible default fonts for most common typefaces for other
    platforms (for example, there is rarely actually a 'Helvetica'
    installed any more, but there is pretty much always Nimbus Sans
    which is metric and look compatible).

    I'm not sure what the performance impact of this might be yet
    - I'm hoping it might fix some of the field performance problems
    that seem to plague some linux distributions since various
    things are cached now which weren't before. More testing will
    be needed to see if this is indeed the case.


Kevin also noted that some progress has been made in diagnosing the 
cause of the printPaperOrientation issue, but that the solution is "not 
straightforward" so he doesn't have a fix in hand just yet and will try 
to squeeze one in within the couple of weeks.

Things are looking better each week for those of us enjoying Linux 
deployments. :)

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
  revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv