[Fontconfig] Tutorial or guidance for using fontconfig

[Robert Kerr]

Hi all,

First, let me introduce myself.  My name is Bob Kerr, and I'm 
investigating the possibility of involving fontconfig into VTK.  It seems 
like this would be a good match, and there's some good excitement on the 
vtk side for this.

Now, I've got fontconfig 2.6.0 installed, and it seems that everything is 
working correctly, as far as I can tell.  But, there doesn't seem to be 
any way to get from where I am to where I want to go.  I firmly believe 
that fontconfig is useful, and viable, and valuable, but I can't find any 
type of documentation or tutorial or guide as to how to put fontconfig 
into my application.  There's the developers' guide, which is just a list 
of functions and a brief description.  There's the users' guide, which 
describe how to add fonts to fontconfig and then use an application that 
uses fontconfig.  There's some slides that Keith has posted (from years 
ago) about the reasons for fontconfig.  But there's nothing out there that 
tells me how to integrate it.

After some lengthy searching, I've found a few items that make me somewhat 
concerned--requests for help from other people in my position, which have 
gone unanswered, both to this list and in other forums.  I took the 
initiative to email one of those requestors, and they responded that they 
had received no help from the fontconfig community, and had decided that 
fontconfig wasn't important for their application, since it looked to be 
too high of a cost to try to integrate it, since there was no help 
available.

So, in a perhaps futile gesture, I'm asking once again if there is some 
sort of Newbie Guide to Integrating fontconfig into an Application.  Or, 
failing that, is there an application that uses fontconfig and is 
well-structured, such that I can learn from it?  Or, failing that, is 
there anyone in the fontconfig community that is willing to mentor 
someone?

I realize that this is something that isn't fun to do--the mentoring of 
new people, but if the goal of fontconfig is to provide a standard 
interface and mechanism for handling fonts across a wide variety of 
platforms and applications, then it behooves the community to provide some 
way to get more people using it, rather than just ignoring requests for 
guidance.

Thanks in advance for any answers you might be able to provide.

-- 
-bob

Bad Performance Evaluations: "This employee is depriving a village
somewhere of an idiot."
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*      Robert Kerr, Member of the Cubit Mesh Generation Team         *
*       and the Titan Informatics Toolkit Development Team           *
*      rakerr at sandia.gov          |    PO Box 5800,  MS 0376         *
*      Phone: (505) 844-8606      |    Sandia National Labs          *
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