Fonts

[J. Landman Gay]

Peter Alcibiades wrote:

> So there are two things happening which seem like they shouldn't be - at 
> least, they don't happen like this in any other application.  One is that you 
> can't pick a lot of the fonts which other applications can see and pick.  The 
> second is that even for the ones you can pick, I can't seem to use any size 
> over 24.

The Revolution unix engine is tied to the old X11 font system, and will 
only point to fonts recognized by that. What I think is happening is 
that you only have a small subset of fonts compatible with X11, so those 
are the only ones that show up in the menu.

I am very hazy on this, but if X11 is a bitmap structure rather than a 
scaling font structure (which I think it is) then only those fonts that 
have particular bitmap sizes will work. If there is no corresponding 
bitmap size to the one you choose, it looks like the engine substitutes 
a default size (apparently 12 point.)

The sizes listed in the text menu are hard-coded in, and do not 
necessarily represent sizes you actually have installed. That's why you 
can choose them, but they fail.

> The thing I can't figure out is, where Revolution is getting its font list 
> from, and how to either point it someplace else or put the other fonts there.  
> But its equally mysterious why it will only allow some sizes and not others 
> for the ones it sees!  And it really would be nice to be able to use 
> wingdings or symbol or whatever....

There isn't much you can do until the engine is rewritten to use a more 
modern font system. You could look for X11-compatible versions of the 
fonts you want to use, as a workaround for now. If you haven't already, 
an enhancement request in Bugzilla (or even a bug report, as it seems 
like a significant problem to me) would be in order, the sooner the better.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com