Another F11 feature worth testing

Behdad Esfahbod behdad at behdad.org
Wed Feb 25 19:16:23 UTC 2009


Caolán McNamara wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 18:48 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>> 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
> 
>> Pango will then call back with any languages which need
>> installing, 
> 
> Are we talking less "Automatic Font Installation" in a "you don't
> Liberation Serif which this document wants to use, want to install it"
> kind of a way but more "Automatic code-point coverage font installation"
> in a "to display this text you need a font that contains the requested
> glyphs".

The font packages are tagged with languages they support as well as the
families they provide.  For now, Pango+PackageKit only detect the missing
language support case and offer installing fonts for the language.

The PackageKit API supports suggesting installing families too.  Apps like
OO.o can use that.  The problem however is how to detect a missing font, given
all the aliasing that goes on.  For example, if the document asks for Arial,
and user has Liberation installed, the requirement is satisfied, but it's hard
to detect.  On the other hand, if Liberation is not installed, PackageKit
currently has no way to know that the liberation-fonts package provides Arial
compat fonts.  Those kind of aliases need to be added manually on a per
package basis.

All in all, family-based autoinstallation is planned, but not fully fleshed
out yet.

behdad

> C.
> 




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