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There are a lot of things that Linux does well and continues to do well. Web serving. Firewalls. Server stuff. And it is making great inroads into the desktop, too. But I have found what might be Linux's next big hurdle: fonts.
One of the varied benefits of a unified GUI is that a number of other things get unified, too. Environments such as Windows and MacOS are the obvious examples. Applications automatically get a lot of things in common. You get a common look and feel, a common widget set, common window management, a common print-engine, common font-handling. The OS handles a lot of these things for you. It is possible to put a lot of this aside, though not always that easy. But it is easier and makes for smaller code to just use the provided stuff.
Unix has tried this repeatedly over the years - that's where things like the CDE came from - but has never had the advantage of a monopolist to set them in concrete. Linux sort of inherited this diversity when it adopted the X Window System as its graphical interface. The Linux community being what it was, of course, meant that KDE and then Gnome appeared - both far superior to CDE.
But this hasn't addressed fonts. Currently, installing a new font requires adding it to the display (i.e. X windows), your printing system (e.g. ghostscript) and any application that sort of does it own thing with fonts - which is most, if not all, of the applications trying to be any sort of major application on Linux. It is also a fiddly affair, exposing the gory details of the metadata about fonts that the various rendering engines need to know. And a new trend which caught me by surprise is that Gnome seems to have or is developing its own printing engine (gnome-print). This is a good idea - on paper. In practice, unless all applications you run use it, it is merely one more thing which must know about all your fonts.
I did manage to install my fonts. More or less. X knows about them, which is enough for now. I needed to download something from the 'net to install Type 1 fonts suitably, which was a strange omission from Red Hat - almost as though adding Type 1 fonts was something they didn't expect you to want to do. Naturally, Windows has it all over X here. I'm sure you all know how easy it is to install another font in Windows.
But if Linux wants to take the desktop, then this issue must be addressed sooner or later. Because J Random User will want all their 60 zillion fonts.
Wade Bowmer, aka Static.
Comments? Email me at static dash page at yceran dot org.
