[Fontconfig] What can Fonconfig really do for average user??

[Keith Packard]

Around 9 o'clock on Feb 23, "Randy Burgess" wrote:

> My question is - for a beginning Linux user, is Fontconfig worth the
> trouble? 

Fontconfig centralizes and regularizes font configuration for a wide 
selection of applications.  As such, it helps the user only in so far as 
applications care to take advantage of it.

Furthermore, it has nothing to do with rendering of the glyphs themselves; 
it's just a library for locating and selecting fonts.  However, many 
applications using fontconfig also use the Xft library which hooks the 
high-quality FreeType2 rasterizer (well, high quality if you turn on the 
byte code interpreter) to X applications.  Such applications will have 
anti-aliased text and text optimized for LCD screens, so they will look 
much better than older applications.

I don't know if the SuSE version of Mozilla is built with fontconfig and 
Xft support; such code is in Mozilla CVS, but isn't universally deployed 
yet.

-keith