Re: [Fwd: Re: [Dlc-discuss] The Path to the Desktop]

Vadim Plessky wrote:
> Hello James,
> 
> I need to say that I tend to agree with majority of the things Havoc wrote in 
> his mail.

I guess that to me it sounded too far off in the future.  Like it would 
come to pass about the time Plan-9 was a common OS. :-)

> GhostScript is kind of legacy application, IMO. We still need it, but I hope 
> we would be able to get rid of GS in nearest future.
> Most of GS developers are working on Windows platform, and they DO NOT CARE 
> about Linux/UNIX. Believe me, I have asked them about FontConfig/unified font 
> configuration with other Linux apps, and that was the answer.
> Ok, may be the answer was "if you implement this, we can adapt", but they are 
> not going to implement FC compatibility on their own.

That isn't very encouraging.  But for now at least, either they adopt FC or 
FC & XFree86 need to support GhostScript.  That is, a program: mkfontmap 
needs to come with XFree86/FontConfig.  Setting the two search paths is a 
problem because you can't (AFAIK) go backwards on the execution tree 
(towards init) to set environment variables.  But, features to evaluate the 
font paths and set the GS paths could be added to FontConfig so that you 
just called: fc-cache with a parameter in profile (just after it sources 
the 'profile.d' scripts, I think), and it would keep a copy of and then add 
the directories to GS_LIB or GS_FONTPATH depending on whether or not they 
had a "Fontmap" file  It would have to check that it didn't make 
duplicates. If this were written so that there was a library interface, 
then the only change you need to make to GhostScript is that instead of 
reading the environment variables from the system, it makes a call to 
FontConfig to get them.  This should be simple to add to FontConfig and 
GhostScript.

> Xr/Xc platform (now renamed to "Cairo") is very powerful rendering platform 
> based on PostScript and SVG primitives, with possibility to support export to 
> PDF in the future.

Yes, I understood that they planed PostScript and PDF export.  But, I 
didn't see any mention of a native file format.  If it is going to replace 
GhostScript for printing, it must be able to save to a file and then render 
the file.

> CUPS is working like a daemon already for some time (at least on my computer)
> Several Linux distributions (in particular: Mandrake) ship ESP (a-ka: 
> CUPS-optimized) GhostScript as standard GS interpreter.
> So, CUPS/GS integration is already happened for users of those distros.

I don't think that CUPS and GhostScript are very well integrated.  CUPS 
appears to require a modified GhostScript -- they don't just build in an 
additional device.  Perhaps this isn't the case, but I was unable to build 
GS-8.10 with the CUPS device.

And, I see no solution here for the problem with CUPS and fonts installed 
in the $HOME directory.  CUPS doesn't call GhostScript as the user that 
submitted the job so there is NO way to find the user's private fonts.  I 
would say that users having private fonts was a bad idea (perhaps it *is*) 
but FontConfig has made provisions for them.

I'm really not sure how FontConfig deals with the user fonts, but 
obviously, it needs to know which user if it is going to find the fonts!

--
JRT


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