[Fontconfig] Tutorial or guidance for using fontconfig

[Jesper L. Nielsen]

On Jan 7, 2009, at 5:16 PM, Robert Kerr wrote:
> 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.
>

Hi Robert.

I haven't been very active on this list, but I do recognise some of  
your concerns, and I wanted to share my experience with Pango/ 
Fontconfig/Freetype.

My goal was to implement Pango on an embedded system in order to  
display foreign languages. I already had Freetype implemented, so the  
Pango/Fontconfig/Freetype solution seemed like an easy way to go.  
However as you already found out Fontconfig really doesn't have no  
documentation really, and the community around Fontconfig is non  
existent (or not to be found). I have had help from Keith Packard, who  
is the main developer of Fontconfig, but he is a busy man.

Anyway, I did my research the hard way: Looking through a lot of  
source code :) The conclusion I have now reached is that Fontconfig is  
not designed for embedded system (no one claimed it would be though)  
because it's way to CPU intensive when searching for fonts to use  
(basically, the Font Family to real font-file transition). At the  
moment I'm looking at taking out Fontconfig from Pango, but  
unfortunately their are tightly bound together in the Pango sourcecode.

After reading the replies to your email, I'm wondering if Cairo would  
be the right way to go for me to?

  Anyway I don't know much about VTK besides what I could Google.  
However I think Fontconfig is best used on Desktop system, where the  
user would like to change between a lot of fonts, and deals with many  
different resolutions.

Hope you can use the feedback, and I'll be happy to share further  
Fontconfig findings with you :)

--
Jesper L. Nielsen
Senior Software Engineer @ 2M-Locatel