Font selection logic defective?

[Huw D M Davies]

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 05:58:59PM -0800, Bill Medland wrote:
> On January 18, 2005 03:00 pm, Huw D M Davies wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 12:08:17PM -0800, Bill Medland wrote:
> > > (Huw?)
> > >
> > > Do I need to dig deeper to understand this or is there a defect in the
> > > logic. If there are ttf fonts available does that mean a poor ttf match
> > > will be selected even when a better x11drv font is available?
> >
> > Yes that's right, and also intentional.  It's basically impossible to
> > do proper font support with server side fonts, so if we have any fonts
> > we can use on the client side then we'll do client side rendering.
> 
> But surely in my case it's still client-side rendering; it's just that it 
> isn't the freetype that is doing it. (NB I haven't the faintest idea what I 
> am talking about, of course, not knowing much about freetype)

No, when there are no TrueType fonts then Wine lets the XServer do the
font rendering and thus uses the fonts that the XServer knows about.
This is server-side rendering.  Unfortunately the X11 protocol doesn't
give nearly enough control over the rendering to emulate the win32 api
font capabilities, so we really try to use client-side font
rendering whenever possible.

> Basically what is frustrating me here is that a client's perfectly good 
> Enterprise level operating system comes with a plethora of fonts, only a 
> couple of which are ttf and our system selects from that small list instead 
> of the much larger list (which presumably freetype supports but we don't) and 
> there is no way to stop it.

At some point we should add support of Type1 PostScript fonts and this
may help.

> The only option available seems to me to be to 
> install (illegally?) the appropriate Microsoft ttf fonts (e.g. Arial).

If you really want the output to look like Windows then this is the
only solution.  I suggest you read the EULA of these fonts.

Huw.
-- 
Huw Davies
huw at codeweavers.com