[MPlayer-dev-eng] deprecating bitmap font support

[Rich Felker]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 07:14:18PM +0200, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> On Monday, 11 September 2006 at 18:55, fab wrote:
> > On 11/09/06 17:40 +0200, Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > > On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 12:41:28PM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> > > > I think it's time to deprecate the bitmap font support and move to
> > > > FreeType.  We can start by removing the font download links from the
> > > > homepage and update the documentation to tell people to use TrueType
> > > > fonts instead.  Eventually we could turn off bitmap font support by
> > > > default.
> > > > 
> > > > Opinions?
> > > 
> > > Agree, though switching from bitmap to ttf fonts means for many people
> > > that they will (beides adding a subfont.ttf) have to add subcp=... to their config file.
> > > Would be good if they had a way to find out without asking on -users :-)

Well yes, but how is this any worse than having to select a bitmap
font that corresponds to the legacy 8bit locale in use?

> > Isn't it possible to provide one (hardcoded or installed somewhere) by
> > default ? The are plenty good and free fonts.
> 
> If fontconfig support is built in, it's enough to specify
> fontconfig=yes
> font="Nimbus Sans L"
> in the config file. That font should be present on most distros, as it
> is part of urw-fonts. If not, maybe we can ship that font (it's small
> and free).

If fontconfig is installed, font="Sans" is the correct default.
However, IMO MPlayer should include a builtin free Type1 font with at
least ascii chars so that it can function in the absence of external
files. It's easy to hardcode a font.. actually MPlayer already does it
for OSD pictures.

Rich