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<TITLE>thinking about font variables</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>After sleeping on it, I’d like to propose 2 new kinds of font variables for GRASS.<BR>
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GRASS_FONTPATH would be an environmental variable like GRASS_PROJSHARE. It is a convenience to help users get to their fonts easily without a lot of browsing around. Like GRASS_PROJSHARE, this could be set manually (e.g., in a user’s .profile) or Init.sh will make some reasonable guesses as to a logical path on each platform (e.g., /Library/Fonts on a Mac OS X). It could be used from the command line or in the GUI to get to the font directory for easy font selection—e.g., the default font path shown in the autogenerated dialog for d.text could be initially set to $GRASS_FONTPATH.<BR>
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GRASS_DEFAULTFONT would be a GRASS environmental variable, optionally set in .grassrc6. It would take any value accepted by d.font. The purpose of this variable would be to allow for a default font to be set by the user and persist from session to session. If GRASS_DEFAULTFONT is not set, GRASS would simply default to it current stroke font setting. Explicitly setting d.font or specifying a font in something like d.text would temporarily override GRASS_DEFAULTFONT. I can see how I can use it in the rendering part of the GUI to use this font for every rendering operation. It would be nice, however, if this could be used automatically for any display command that renders fonts (e.g., d.legend). <BR>
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Implementing this in the GUI is fairly trivial. I don’t know what kind of work would be needed to make d.* commands automatically respect GRASS_DEFAULTFONT, however.<BR>
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Michael<BR>
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Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology<BR>
School of Human Evolution & Social Change <BR>
Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity<BR>
Arizona State University<BR>
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phone: 480-965-6213<BR>
fax: 480-965-7671<BR>
www: <a href="http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton">http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton</a> <BR>
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