defoma for Debian ---------------------- DEFOMA stands for DEbian FOnt MAnager. Whenever a font is installed or removed, every application that depends on or makes use of or anyway has something to do with the font has to be configured about the font. Such a process should be automated, but in fact only a few applications automate it. It means that each user or a system administrator needs to configure most of applications manually about fonts, to make use of fonts from the applications. This is really waste of time and requires knowledge to some degree. Defoma can do configuration about fonts automatically in place of a system administrator. In fact Defoma just provides a framework of automatic configuration about fonts. Its rough flow is, a font gets registered to Defoma with its category and hints, then a configuration script of each application gets called. The script is needed to be provided for each category by an application. PostScript fonts are more problematic, because what PS fonts are available for printing are completely unknown to applications. Applications that output PostScript file (like tgif and abiword) may provide a menu for choosing PS fonts. Ideally such a menu contains all of the printable PS fonts, but actually only well-known and general PS fonts are included. For PS Printer users, Defoma provides a nice interface to register PS printer fonts (called defoma-psfont-installer), and for users who print PS files by using a PS renderer (like ghostscript), the renderer registers PS fonts as printable. These mechanisms cause such applications to have enough information for the menu. In addition, these PS fonts are registered with their hints, which is very useful for font substitution. If a PS previewer cannot provide all the printable PS fonts, previewable PS fonts should substitute for lacking printable PS fonts. Hints help to decide which font is the best (that is, the most similar) to substitute for each of the lacking fonts. This substituting mechanism is another feature of Defoma. -- Yasuhiro Take , Sat, 2 Dec 2000 00:14:21 +0900