[Haskell-cafe] Trouble installing and using Chart/cairo on windows 7

[Brent Yorgey]

On Mon, Mar 04, 2013 at 02:30:55PM -0800, briand at aracnet.com wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Mar 2013 17:27:29 -0500
> Brent Yorgey <byorgey at seas.upenn.edu> wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Mar 03, 2013 at 05:38:02PM -0800, briand at aracnet.com wrote:
> > > On Sun, 3 Mar 2013 19:58:37 -0500
> > > Brent Yorgey <byorgey at seas.upenn.edu> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > 
> > > > 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