Another F11 feature worth testing

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 23:34 +0000, Caolán McNamara wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 14:26 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > Here is another F11 feature that will become complete enough to warrant
> > testing in the next few days: 
> > 
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/AutoFontsAndMimeInstaller
> 
> What's the technical kung-foo behind the auto-font stuff ? Might be good
> if OOo did it too, though sort of late now to do anything about it for
> F-11 if its intricate.

There is a loadable GTK+ module that hooks into the Pango fontmap to do
the magic: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libpk-gtk-module.so

>From the README in PackageKit-0.4.0/contrib/gtk-module:

The GTK+ module is designed to be loaded using gnome-settings-daemon by
the gnome-packagekit package.

It can however be launched for testing using:

GTK_MODULES="$GTK_MODULES:/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/pk-gtk-module.so"
application

The module installs a custom default pangocairo font map during
gtk_init(). Pango will then call back with any languages which need
installing, and these are queued up. In an idle callback these are
emitted as an asyncronous D-BUS method to the session PackageKit
InstallFonts() method.

If configured to do so, this will prompt the user to install new fonts.



So, if you are loading GTK+ modules and are using Pango to render fonts,
you may be good already (of course, that would be too easy...).