Post-MegaRelease projects (Font Management)

[Kai Uwe Broulik]

Hi,

For the most part for lack of spare time midterm I’ll do some bits here 
and there as well as Qt Wayland stuff.

However, one thing I am currently reworking is the Font Management 
(kfontinst) KCM. It’s entirely based around Xft and there is no way we 
could really salvage this into a Wayland world. It only works under 
Wayland right now because I made it open its own X connection to XWayland…

Therefore, I am working on plasma-fontmanagement (move it into its own 
selfcontained repo, too) to give it a fresh new QML UI taking 
inspiration from various font management apps and websites. I also want 
to be able to expose some of the more modern font features (e.g. 
variable axes)

Of course there’s much more than just the KCM: the font thumbnailer, the 
KIO worker (that I don’t know we really need), the preview app (it’s a 
KPart, too), the installer (click a font file to install it), so it will 
probably not be 6.1 material entirely :-)

My goal is to get as far as possible with rendering through Qt’s font 
engine (which has seen a lot of work in Qt 6.7), though the QML glyph 
cache is abysmally slow compared to Qt 5 (as you can witness in the 
Emojier, too, cf. QTBUG-120007). I might end up just painting everything 
in QPainter, or find a different font rendering lib that isn’t Xft to do 
the job based on what Fontconfig (that I need to query anyway) wants.

Cheers
Kai Uwe