On Mon, Mar 04, 2013 at 02:30:55PM -0800, briand@aracnet.com wrote:

On Mon, 4 Mar 2013 17:27:29 -0500 Brent Yorgey wrote:

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On Sun, Mar 03, 2013 at 05:38:02PM -0800, briand@aracnet.com wrote:

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On Sun, 3 Mar 2013 19:58:37 -0500 Brent Yorgey wrote:

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Good access to fonts and font metrics is the kicker. Otherwise I'd say to switch to using diagrams as a backend, hence getting a whole bunch of actual backends for free. I would love to see development of some good Haskell font packages -- maybe it would even make a good GSoC project? Unfortunately I don't know enough about it to even know what would be involved, or how much work it would be.

I assume that to use diagram the font package would have to be a vector font system, or could bit-mapped fonts be used ?

A vector font system would be ideal, as then you could go crazy turning glyphs into paths and doing whatever the heck you want with them using the diagrams framework. However, bit-mapped fonts could be used too (as long as there is a backend to support them), it would just be less useful.

yes - seems to me that vector fonts are definitely the way to go.

it seems like this problem has to already have a solution. maybe all that's needed is a font importer which understands some, already established, vector font representation.

Well, there is the SVGFonts package: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/SVGFonts I don't have a good sense of how widely supported this representation is, or how easy it is to convert between it and other font representations. -Brent