[sldev] Re: jira for open source fonts to be bundled with SL client

Alissa Sabre alissa_sabre at yahoo.co.jp
Tue Aug 28 04:33:56 PDT 2007


> > I have fonts covering unique ranges on my system (Linux) that show up
> > automatically in other apps but not in SL.  Why is that?

Because SL viewer has its own mechanism to find font files.  See
linden/indra/llrender/llfont{,gl}.{h,cpp} for details.

> X11 fonts can be handled by the display server or the application,  
> and provided from a font server or a plain file.

Currently, Linux SL viewer directly uses FreeType library to render
fonts ("handled by application".)  It doesn't use good old X11
mechanisms (nor xft).  It doesn't use X font server; It assumes that
the font files are available as local files.

The current Linux viewer is very poor on finding fallback fonts; it
relies on "unicode.ttf" symbolic link, hence you can specify only one
fallback font file.  (Unless you modify settings.xml manually using
undocumented(?) parameters.)

Note that there are few exceptions, however.  GTK dialog boxes are used in some
context (I know file chooser and fatal error message box.  Don't know
anything else), and they use GTK's mechanism to find and render fonts
(based on your personal configuration of GTK runtime.)

> SL has to  
> be able to make them available to OpenGL.

SL viewer uses FreeType library to render glyphs and passes the resulting
images to GL as textures.  This behaviour is common on all platforms.

> > MacOS has two font file directories; /Library/Fonts
> > and /System/Library/Fonts.
> 
> Three. You need to look in ~/Library/Fonts as well.

I believe the original context of this discussion was to minimize the
differences of text appearences between residents.  I assume
~/Library/Fonts is for private additions that are not available even
to other users of that particular Macintosh.  I see no point to make
SL to look into private font directory.

If we, in a future, allow residents to use personal favorite fonts in
viewer (as a part of customizable skin?), the viewer may need to search
in there.

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