Universal themes: a proposal

[François Revol]

> > Well, most themes usually want distinctive fonts.
> > Usually it's done by people who don't really care about licences 
> > though 
> > or disregard them as they make them up just for themselves first 
> > (as I 
> > did), and just take whichever TTF they find on the net that match 
> > their 
> > liking.
> 
> Therefore, please do *not* specify a new font deployment system. A 
> theme
> can reference specific fonts (css-like, via font names), but if you
> start deploying font files outside the normal system-wide font
> management layer, this is going to clash/be incoherent with the
> remapping/configuring done at this level, and is going to fail 
> horribly
> as soon as you try to use it for anything but trivial ascii-only
> scripts.

Well, it depends on the OS though, some have centralized package 
management like apt, others don't...

What is possible is list font names css-like yes, as I mentionned in a 
previous post.

An alternative to embedding the files would be to give urls to locate 
them.
CSS does have a provision for this also (though IIRC it's an M$ 
extension).

> Do *not* assume you can just specify font needs with ascii-only 
> European
> languages in mind, and shoehorn i18n/opentype typographic features 
> later
> trivialy. This won't work. Modern font use is very complex and best 
> left
> to dedicated management systems.

I do know, I use BeOS (and Haiku), and we've been using UTF-8 for over 
a decade, before Linux even knew about it.

François.