[Fontconfig] Tutorial or guidance for using fontconfig

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Jesper L. Nielsen wrote:
> On Jan 7, 2009, at 5:16 PM, Robert Kerr wrote:
[...]
> 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).

Do you have any numbers?  If you don't have many fonts, it can't be slow.
And I'm working on making it much faster as we speak.

> At the  
> moment I'm looking at taking out Fontconfig from Pango, but  
> unfortunately their are tightly bound together in the Pango sourcecode.

That makes little sense.

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

Cairo doesn't do any internationalization.  It buys you nothing, text-wise.
And it requires fontconfig still.

>   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.

I disagree.  Fontconfig is in use on many embedded systems already.

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

behdad