Fonts for the backend

[Shai Ayal]

Hi all,

I'm working (at a snail's pace) on text rendering for the graphics
backend and we need to consider the font issue:

While windows and OSX come with a core set of fonts that are assured
to be in all systems, linux has no such feature. Moreover, I am not a
font expert but I'm not sure the core fonts available in other systems
are adequate for our needs. Also, I'm not sure how to test for font
existence in the configure script.

My solution in octplot was to include a set of 4 core fonts
(Helvetica, Times, Courier, Symbol) in the distribution

The pros:
A known set of core fonts
the URW fonts are metric-compatible with the core postscript fonts, so
screen & postscript/pdf fonts look similar
No need to do system specific searches for fonts

The cons:
adds ~150K per font to the distro
most linux systems probably have these fonts installed somewhere
maintain the fonts

Shai