Hi Andreas,

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 8:57 AM, Andreas Raab<andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> I just finished a bit of work for supporting Truetype fonts directly from
> disk which will make it quite a bit easier to support non-latin languages.

cool. :-)

> An open question at this point to me is what the right combination of fonts
> for the next release might be. As far as I can tell, we have three basic
> choices:
> 1) Ship all the fonts with the image. Either Vera and friends in-memory, or
> Dejavu on disk. Nice and self-contained, but eats space.
> 2) Use all the fonts on the platform. Drop Vera and instead give people
> access to local fonts. Compact, but makes images less portable.
> 3) Do some combo of having a certain set of fonts in the image, for example
> Vera for basic LGC coverage and use platform fonts for the rest. Compact and
> portable unless you need the extended fonts.

Personally, I would prefer #2, as it is very lean. I agree there is a
problem with portability. Perhaps #3 is the best solution (most
pragmatic).

In HTML/CSS, there are font "names" like "sans-serif" that just denote
a standard font - whatever it might be. If a concrete font name is
given instead ("Arial"), that one is used, otherwise, "sans-serif"
just falls back to the default (which might be "Arial" as well).

Perhaps something like this would make some sense? Of course, it would
imply quite some effort to maintain the required font maps.

Anyway. It's just an idea.

Best,

Michael