Universal themes: a proposal

[François Revol]

Le Sat, 10 Apr 2010 13:54:50 -0400, Liam R E Quin a écrit :
> On Sat, 2010-04-10 at 17:15 +0200, François Revol wrote:
> [...]
> > Again, it makes sense for OSes that do have centralized package 
> > management...
> 
> What you need is font configuration, not package management.
> Try running fc-list on your system.

Haiku doesn't have font config. It doesn't use X11 either.

> If you go including fonts in themes, you'll find there aren't
> all that many worthwhile fonts that allow it, and most of those
> have only the old Adobe Basic Latin glyph complement.

Yep I know...

> Probably what you need to specify is a place where applications 
> should
> look for fonts - e.g. ~/.fonts - and a way to include a set of fonts
> (a single font for all of Unicode is technically possible, but runs
> into difficulties when you intermix e.g. Korean and Chinese, where 
> the
> same Unicode character (code-point) must map into different font/
> glyphc

Some OSes have automatic Unicode block remapping to provide fallbacks 
for glyphs not present in fonts.

Anyway.

> A standard mechanism to identify when two fonts are "the same" is
> needed here, not only based on font name and glyph coverage.


> 
> > Remember we are talking about Themes, which are supposed to be 
> > applied 
> > to the whole desktop itself (mostly)
> 
> I'm not sure why you're so worried about people running a themable
> desktop on systems without package management. This is 2010. Yes,
> sure, there are a few hobbyists building their own distributions, but

In case you didn't read before, I'm thinking about Haiku, which doesn't 
yet have centralized package mgmt. Many other OSes don't either.
There is more than GNU/Linux around :p

> Let's all work together to make desktops that work on systems that
> have known properties, though, before worrying about SunOS 4.1 or
> OS/360, or embedded Linux. It's true that the "Macintosh Way" is
> closer to having each application include its own fonts, as is
> the "Windows Way" - but I don't think those systems have desktops
> that adhere to XDG specs by default.

Haiku doesn't follow most XDG specs either due to not using X11...

> >  (I hate skinned apps cause the 
> > break GUI consistency, but desktop themes are not the same).
> But isn't that a matter of personal preference?

Indeed.
(or brain sanity :p)

> While you're about it, shouldn't there be support for background
> music (mp3, ogg) and full-screen video files? Such things are not

In Haiku, Themes saves filenames (and volume) of system sounds too.

As for videos, I used to play divx fullscreen with the player window 
hidden and the desktop color set to the overlay color key... funny but 
not really usable.

Though something like an aquatic theme featuring a waterfall video to 
put in the background could be nice indeed.

> currently part of desktop themes in most environments, although
> sound clips are. This raises the question of wanting to install
> only certain components of a theme, or of a theme downloader that
> lets you choose components.

Yep, again it's what I do in Themes:
http://revolf.free.fr/beos/shots/shot_haiku_themes_plugins.png

I believe even M$ Plus Theme control panel did something alike back in 
windows 98.

> By the way, Microsoft did not invent @font-face -- it's part of CSS.
Could be, didn't read the specs.

> They just made the first Web browser to support it. They did, 
> however,
> use a proprietary font format, exactly because their customers wanted
> to use fonts on the Web that can't just be copied or given away.

Yes, DRM SUX...

> There's now a W3C Working Group for agreeing on an open font format 
> that
> can be used by all browsers (probably based on "woff"), and it's very
> likely that any work done on fonts in themes should take this into
> account. The idea of using a wrapper format around a font is that 
> people
> can't just download a font from someone's Web server and use it on 
> their
> desktop without converting it, so that they get a chance to see the
> licence,
> 
> There's also work on encouraging the creation of fonts that can be
> shared freely - see www.openfontlibrary.org for example, and
> www.libregraphicsmeeting.org - and although that work is progressing
> fairly slowly, it is moving forward.

Yes hopefully!

François.