[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#2414) tileset font problems

["Jason Short via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[astuckey@xxxxxxxx - Thu Dec  5 03:49:41 2002]:

> On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 05:40:46AM -0800, Reinier Post via RT wrote:
> > Generally speaking, I don't think font specifications are GUI system
> > independent.  I mean, you just do not *want* to specify the city name
> > font in a GUI independent way.
> 
>       !?!?!!
>       "Courier" should work fine and be perfectly GUI-independent.  Even
> something like "Symbol Bold 12" should work and be GUI-independent.
> The X font specifications are horribly over-complex.
> 
>       Or am I completely misunderstanding what you want to say here?

I'm no expert, but I believe the current situation is this:

The tileset defines certain fonts by providing a font description
string.  These are city_names_font and city_productions_font.  The font
descriptions are loaded along with the tileset.

These font descriptions are X font descriptions, e.g., "9x15bold".  They
are only of use to the XAW client.  So the XAW client uses these
descriptions to load its fonts (I think).  Other clients make up their
own fonts as necessary.

The fact that the tileset claims to have control over the fonts but
doesn't is one problem here.  This corresponds to how the font
descriptions are in tilespec.c, but are only useable by gui-xaw.  An
underlying problem is that the fonts are entirely run by the GUI, so
there is no way to have a consistent font system even if we wanted to.

I would propose to address the last problem first, by having graphics.h
(or perhaps fonts.h) provide struct font, load_font(), and free_font().
 tilespec.h can then have a struct named_fonts similar to the current
sprite list; this struct will be initialized haphazardly just as it is
now.  We will then at least have a consistent set of fonts - two of them
to start with, but others should be added to avoid the misuse that is
currently happening.

Where we go from there I am not sure.

jason