[cairo] Ann: Cairo diagrams available (kind of)

[Donn]

> Seen fontmatrix?
Yes. It looks really good, but there are some things I don't like; the main 
one is that it *copies* all the fonts into another folder thus duplicating 
hundreds of files (and megabytes.) FP handles things entirely with soft 
links.

I would like to know how they get the names of the character maps like "Basic 
Latin", "Mathematical Operators", "Private Use Area" and so forth. Are these 
simply "understood" or literally named within the font file? I am limited by 
Python not having a thorough FT2 interface module; I use PIL which is the 
best one I have found so far.

Sure, I should get onto hacking that for myself, but I really must stand on 
other shoulders to get anything done!

Overall, there should be a font manager built-into GTK/Gnome that lets people 
*filter* the fonts controlled by fontconfig -- that way one could simply 
leave all the fonts under system control and "view" those you are using on a 
per-project basis. 
 The problem really boils-down (for graphic designers) to having font choosers 
that are too full; one cannot locate fonts for all the thousands that appear 
in the list.
 This is what FP is trying to do; temporarily "install" fonts into 
fontconfig's purview (so they appear in apps) and then remove them again (so 
they go away).

\d