Here's a concrete example of the linux font problem

[Richmond Mathewson]

On 22/02/2010 11:16, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> Here is a concrete example.  I don't understand how Rev can be handling
> fonts in such a way that this happens.
>
> We open Rev, create a new stack, a new button, and then set the fonts.  The
> choices available in the 'i' category are these:
>
> itwasntme
> itc avantgarde
> itc bookman
> itc zapf chancery
>
>
> Now we open OpenOffice and choose a font in a word document, and are
> offered, in the 'i' category, these choices:
>
> idautomation3of9
> iscopeur
> iscocteur
> itwasntme
> italian garamond
>
> So how exactly is Rev getting its fonts?  And why does it appear to get a
> bunch that OpenOffice is not getting?  And why does it fail to get the
> idautomation?  Just to verify, I tried Kwrite.  This gets the same fonts as
> OpenOffice, with an additional one, impact.
>    

Frankly, it looks as if the situation with fonts on Linux is in need of 
some connsiderable
sorting out - after all, it is not JUST RunRev that is having trouble 
finding all the fonts.

> Very strange.
>
>    
Indeed.

Now I knocked together a silly little stack called "Fontgetter" (an 
original name too)
that contains one scrolling text field "FONTZ" and a button that 
contains this script:

on mouseUp
   put the fontNames into fld "FONTZ"
end mouseUP

on my Ubuntu box it listed about 20 fonts which seem to bear little or 
no resemblance
to any other program's font listings.

NOW: the same silly stack on both my G4 Mac and my Headless XP box lists 
all the
fonts present: which is lovely and as things should be on Linux.

Programmers need to know that, should they be leveraging a particular 
font that:

End-users will be able to install that font easily (i.e. no 'funny' 
command-line stuff)
in a place where the RunRev standalone can 'see' it and use it.