The POS app I've been speaking of here for the longest time was written several years before Keith Packard decided to invent the Xft and fontconfig libraries to make use of things like FreeType. It has always been happy using the X core fonts. These are not supported, however, on the subset of X that is used on the 770 - the Maemo platform. Matthew Allum's advice (which we have accepted) is that we replace our use of the X core fonts with the Xft and fontconfig libraries. It's turned out to not be such an easy task.

We've made some progress on this but it's been frustrating and we haven't succeeded yet. I'd like to put out a call to anyone who has experience with Xft and fontconfig to step forward and help us out. There is money attached to this, by the way, for anyone who can help.

Any app using the X core fonts will have to make this same change to the way it uses fonts, by the way. It is such an obstacle that people will have to overcome again and again so when we eventually have nailed this we will document it and provide the source to all. It isn't a walk in the park but it is necessary.

It may be that the GTK+ work is directly applicable here - we haven't looked into that yet. GTK+ also solves the X input method problem, I believe. For any who care, Keith Packard developed the Xft and fontconfig libraries along with a lot of other parts of X to make it a better windowing and protocol system for today's requirements. The 770's implementation of X by Matthew has the effect of requiring X apps to be rewritten to use these libraries and to reject X apps that use the X core fonts. My email is embedded in the ITT user area for anyone who is interested.