Fonts in Dia

Note for Windows users: Most of these considerations have very little effect on font handling under Windows, as totally different systems operate there. There is a note about Windows font handling at the bottom of this page.

Fonts have long been a problematic area for Dia under Unix, mostly due to the way they are handled by X. The main problem is that X doesn't give access to the font info itself, only to the bitmap representations. This means we can't do PostScript output with all fonts, only those that we can depend on being known by the printers. The other big problem stems from the fact that we use the width of text to determine the size of text containers, but text width has turned out to be quite elusive.

Dia version 0.88.1 and earlier restricted font usage to the 'standard 13' PostScript fonts. These were hardcoded into Dia, and there was no check whether they were available as X fonts. Rendering was done with Gdk font handling, while PostScript output was done with standard PostScript font handling. This led to the very unfortunate effect that strings had sometimes vastly different sizes on the screen and on paper. Not good.

In version 0.90, there was experimental support for FreeType2 fonts, including dumping the entire font file into PostScript documents. While this allowed for more fonts, there were several problems:

• The code was a mess, as we had to support two very different font systems.

• FreeType rendering and Gdk rendering didn't agree on the size of fonts, making documents change depending on which font system was in use.

• Dumping the font file into a PostScript document made the document way larger than it needed to be, and could also be a copyright problem.

• FreeType and Gdk didn't agree on the fonts available, making diagrams even more different depending on the font system in use.

• FreeType had no way to find fonts on a remote X server, so some systems didn't allow the FreeType version at all.

At the same time, we were starting more serious internationalization, including adding more fonts to the 'standard 13' list. This was done ad-hoc based on what people thought were commonly available fonts.

Between versions 0.90 and 0.91, we changed to Gtk 2.0. One important change there was the introduction of Pango, a generalized font system with strong internationalization support. Pango sports several backends, including normal Gdk rendering using X, Xft (FreeType rendering with the XRender interface), and FreeType2.

This change led us to recode all of the font handling, making fonts encapsulated within Dia. Instead of having a fixed list of fonts, we decided to have three standard fonts that should always be available (sans, serif and monospace), and then allow the user to add fonts to the font list via standard font requesters. This made the font list more manageable while ensuring that objects and plugins had some standard fonts to refer to.

At the same time, we looked into a related problem: text width does not scale linearly. This is not an implementation bug, but is a side effect of the way modern font renderers make fonts readable at small sizes. What this meant for Dia was that the width of text boxes would vary with the zoom setting, a highly undesirable effect. To avoid this, we now use the 100% zoom setting for fonts to determine the width, and tweak the size of fonts for other zoom settings to be closer to a linear scale. This system works fairly well for all but the most extreme zoom settings.

Our first thought was to use PangoX for screen rendering and PangoFT2 for PostScript rendering, but it turned out that the two differ on font names even for the very same font files. This is due partly to X's XLFD system, which makes things like dashes in font names impractical at best, and partly to seemingly random renamings by font packagers. This continued the diagram incompatibility from 0.90, but made it happen even within the same program. Very bad. Additionally, the two didn't agree on the width of texts, either, even at the supposed same size.

In the end (version 0.91), we decided to rid ourselves entirely of the X font support. All font handling is now done by FreeType2 through PangoFT2, both screen rendering and PostScript output. This means that fonts should appear exactly the same on screen and on paper, and that the font availability issue is more transparent. The downsides are that rendering takes longer (but that can be cached), and that remote X font servers cannot be used by Dia. To ensure that all systems have at least the three standard fonts, we are distributing those with Dia now.

To avoid bloating PostScript files with font files, and to avoid copyright problems, we took a font rendering system from PAPS, a simple Pango PostScript renderer. Instead of actually defining fonts, we just output the shape of the characters. This is reasonably small and further ensures that fonts are the same on screen and on paper. PostScript files with lots of text may become somewhat large with this approach, as we don't cache the character definition code. If this becomes a problem, it is easy to cache. The main problem with this approach is that other PostScript tools won't be able to recognize our text as text, it just looks like funny curves. We consider this a small price to pay for a unified font system with consistent font sizes.

Windows Fonts

Windows uses a very different font system than X. The problems with font naming are unknown in Windows, but unfortunately we cannot currently use FreeType2 in Windows. This doesn't break printing, as Windows has a separate printing system, but we cannot export to EPS except with the standard 13 PostScript fonts.