Identifying remaining core font users

[Avery, David [DENTK]]

I have a bigger problem with this, I use fedora boxes to talk to older
devices (solaris 2.6 and M88KV4 unix machines) that can never be
upgraded to newer X clients. Since the fedora ( or any xorg) servers are
talking to "classic" X11 clients dropping support for core fonts is a
huge issue. 

The clients are running on the host computers for flight simulators. The
clients are built on 3rd party libraries that date from the early 90s.
As the existing Xterms (Tek/NCD ) fail we are replacing them with newer
linux based thin clients, but we still need "classic" X11 font support.
The programming support is done on solaris and linux boxes the need to
display the same layouts as the xterms 

dave

-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-devel-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:fedora-devel-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Richard W.M.
Jones
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 9:38 AM
To: Development discussions related to Fedora
Subject: Re: Identifying remaining core font users

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 04:41:32PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> It seems the people maintaining text libs are not interested in
backends
> that fail if you use codepoints outside a specific encoding, or when
you
> use the "wrong" font (because encoding is just one part that changed,
> OpenType "smart" features such as ligatures and swashes mean that even
> if you restrict yourself to basic latin nowadays a modern font won't
> behave like a "simple" ASCII font used to ten years ago). Probably
> because they know that if they limited themselves users would ask for
> the missing bits anyway.
> 
> Projects that find modern text libs over-complex should try to
maintain
> their own "simple" alternative (or pick up the maintenance of the X11
> Core fonts system). I suspect they'd quickly find themselves in
> agreement with current text lib maintainers.
> 
> So really, it's just a matter of delegation: if you don't want to
> maintain your own text stack, follow the advice of the people
> maintaining the one you use, and the advice of X11 Core fonts
> maintainers (back when there were still some, in 2003) was clear: drop
> it and use fontconfig instead.

Yes ... but ...  we're talking mainly about demos and examples written
for beginners.

------------------------------------------------------- hello.ml --
#!/usr/bin/ocamlrun ocaml

#load "graphics.cma";;
open Graphics

let () =
  open_graph " 200x150";
  set_font "-*-times-*-r-*-*-*-240-*-*-*-*-*-*";
  auto_synchronize false;
  while true do
    let x, y = ref 50, ref 80 in
    List.iter (
      fun c ->
	moveto !x !y;
	let rand () = Random.int 256 in
	set_color (rgb (rand ()) (rand ()) (rand ()));
	draw_char c;
	x := !x + 24;
	if c = ' ' then (y := !y - 24; x := 50)
    ) [ 'H'; 'E'; 'L'; 'L'; 'O'; ' '; 'W'; 'O'; 'R'; 'L'; 'D'; '!' ];
    synchronize ()
  done
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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