Hi,

Jeff Trefftzs writes:

For some time now, on both 1.2.x and 1.3.x, I have noticed some curiosities about the GIMP's font handling. I have downloaded and installed a number of true-type fonts, most of which work fine, as long as I run xfstt to serve them up, but a few of these fonts behave differently depending on which tool I use to view them.

In particular, using GIMP-1.2.5, the text tool by itself fails to show any characters for several of my fonts, meaning I can't use them, although the Freetype tool, while still not letting me use any of the characters, will at least show them in the character grid.

The freetype plug-in uses a completely different architecture to handle fonts. It's not surprising that it behaves differently as X11 font rendering (which is what the text tool in 1.2 uses).

In GIMP-1.3.15, I have similar problems, but now that I'm running RH-9 (a Gnome-2 system), I find that Nautilus can display *all* of my fonts, at least to the point of popping up the gnome-font-viewer when I click on the font file in Nautilus. What are the plans to unify font handling? I realize this is a horribly hairy problem.

For 1.3 the font handling has been unified to the best extent. Nautilus displays the fonts on screen, so it uses the Pango Xft2 backend, while GIMP needs to render bitmaps and uses the Pango FT2 backend. Both backends do however use the same code to manage fonts and they do share the same configuration files. So basically you should be able to use the same fonts and you should get very similar results.

There is one exception and that is fonts that do not provide an Unicode character table. Fonts that fail to do that can be considered broken. The Xft2 backend seems to be able to handle some of these fonts by creating an Unicode table from other info in the font. The Pango FT2 backend however fails to load these broken fonts. This probably needs to be improved at the Pango level.

Sven