[Fontconfig] fontconfig 2.1.91

[Owen Taylor]

On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 11:40, Dan Egnor wrote:
> > By default, only X font directories containing outlines are included
> > in fonts.conf now; the bitmap fonts are generally more of an annoyance
> > than a help.
> 
> Eep.  What about everyone's favorite, misc-fixed?  I hate to have to
> tell users that they have to mess with their system configuration (or
> install a ~/.fonts.conf) to get the full complement of X11 fonts.

Red Hat ships a special bitmap-fonts package which installs 
a small set of selected bitmap fonts in /usr/share/fonts
(misc-fixed and lucidasanstypewriter)

> In what way are the bitmap fonts an annoyance?

 * It's really confusing/bad if bitmap helvetica (etc.) are
   in the set of fonts you are matching against.

 * The bitmap fonts don't necessarily fall into nice families.

 * A lot of the bitmap fonts just clutter up the list of fonts,
   and aren't anything that a user would want to select.
   (open look cursor would be an extreme example.)

 * Plus the bitmap fonts in the X11 font directories are 
   .pcf.gz, the .gz backend in FreeType isn't really mature 
   yet, and is always going to be slow.

Regards,
                                     Owen