224764 - enable freetype (and/or Xprint) in Xft+gtk2 build on ftp.mozilla.org

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Jungshik Shin]

Until we have a better alternative for quality non-Latin1 printing with truetype
fonts, we'd better enable freetype (and/or Xprint) in Xft+gtk2 build so that
non-Western European speakers can benefit from freetype printing. With freetype
printing, multiple fonts (serif, sans-serif, monospace) can be used and more
faithful replica of WYS can be obtained (although not perfect because Xft
screenrendering uses fontconfig while freetype printing uses its own font
selection machinery.)

There was a bug in freetype code that made Mozilla-Xft crash while printing a
page. The bug was fixed a couple of months ago (I fixed it, but forgot the bug
number). So, except for the binary size increase, I don't think there's any
reason not to enable freetype in Xft build.

Comment 1

[Jungshik Shin]

A couple of alternatives proposed so far are :

  bug 190031 : use fontconfig in font selection and matching for freetype 
printing 
  bug 211763 : hook up Xft and Xprint

In addition, there are a couple of more including integration of Gfx:Gtk with 
Pango (for complex script handling) that would ease taking advantage of a 
printing library that depends on it.

Comment 2

[Jungshik Shin]

Bug 190031 is gonna be fixed soon so that we don't need to fix this any more.