How to get font info on *nix?

Ruby
1

I’m thinking about writing a Ruby extension for Linux/*BSD/Darwin to
enumerate all the fonts (Postscript and TTF) that are installed, along
with their attributes. Given such an extension I could write a Ruby
program to generate a custom ImageMagick font config file.

Can somebody enlighten me about where to start? Is there an existing
library I can leverage? I found fontconfig (www.fontconfig.org) but I’m
not sure that’s right.

2

On 11/21/05, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:

I’m thinking about writing a Ruby extension for Linux/*BSD/Darwin to
enumerate all the fonts (Postscript and TTF) that are installed, along
with their attributes. Given such an extension I could write a Ruby
program to generate a custom ImageMagick font config file.

Can somebody enlighten me about where to start? Is there an existing
library I can leverage? I found fontconfig (www.fontconfig.org) but I’m
not sure that’s right.

Take a look near the top of the PDF::Writer main file
(lib/pdf/writer.rb) and you’ll see what I do in order to find existing
fonts. It’s imperfect and somewhat untested, but you may need to parse
the fonts themselves to determine the relevant information.

-austin

3

Quoting “[email protected]” [email protected]:

Can somebody enlighten me about where to start? Is there an
existing library I can leverage? I found fontconfig
(www.fontconfig.org) but I’m not sure that’s right.

Fontconfig is about the closest you can come to a standard for font
configuration on *nix right now. Which is to say: not very, but
it’s probably the best you can do.

It should at least work anywhere that’s got a modern Gtk.

-mental

4

On 11/21/05, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:

It should at least work anywhere that’s got a modern Gtk.
Or xterm, recent xterms can use TrueType fonts, and they are linked
with fontconfig.
I only wish more Xlib applications did that :slight_smile:

Thanks

Michal

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5

Austin Z. wrote:

Take a look near the top of the PDF::Writer main file
(lib/pdf/writer.rb) and you’ll see what I do in order to find existing
fonts. It’s imperfect and somewhat untested, but you may need to parse
the fonts themselves to determine the relevant information.

Verrrry interesting…Thanks, Austin!