Weasyprint: pango-viewer in Debian

Created on 14 Mar 2016 · 8Comments · Source: Kozea/WeasyPrint

I am having a hard time figuring out how can pango-viewer be installed in Debian.
As far as I can see, Debian only has in its repositories pago libraries and not pango-viewer, if I understand correctly is essential to know what fonts Weasyprint can use.

Can anyone please tip me on what would be the best way to have pango-viewer running on Debian Jessie?
Thanks!

Source

andrecastro0o

All 8 comments

¯_(ツ)_/¯

SimonSapin on 14 Mar 2016

😄1

@SimonSapin does that mean that I have to compile pango-viewer from source?

andrecastro0o on 14 Mar 2016

It means that I don’t know.

For what it’s worth, I’ve only suggested pango-viewer in the past as a debugging tool in order to convince issue reporters that their issue is not a bug in WeasyPrint. (Other than the bug "someone someday should rewrite all of WeasyPrint’s text handling to use some lower-level API than PangoLayout.) I don’t think you actually need it, if you take my word or convince yourself by reading the source that WeasyPrint does nothing with the list of family names from font-family property (parsed per CSS) than join it with commas and call pango_font_description_set_family.

SimonSapin on 14 Mar 2016

unhhg... i see, but how do we know what fonts are available for Weasyprint to use? E.g. are the fonts its ~/.fonts available to it?
I am sorry for the naive questions. I am quite a newbie. For month I have been struggling to find good html to print solution and finding Weasyprint was quite something! now in the middle of project trying to produce a book from a wiki and needing to get most issues working :P will let you know when it becomes completed.

andrecastro0o on 14 Mar 2016

unhhg... i see, but how do we know what fonts are available for Weasyprint to use? E.g. are the fonts its ~/.fonts available to it?

Honestly I don’t know, other than that Pango uses fontconfig on Linux to find fonts, and dealing with fontconfig’s configuration. If you want to list all available fonts, there may be a fontconfig command doing that. If all you care about is using a particular .ttf file in WeasyPrint, copying it to ~/.fonts is probably a good start.

@liZe may have more suggestions.

SimonSapin on 14 Mar 2016

👍1

Once again, our favourite search engine will help us finding our way in the maze:

WeasyPrint uses Pango to render characters,
Pango uses fontconfig,
Fontconfig is a library for configuring and customizing font access, that's the library used to list and access fonts!

So, to know the fonts available for WeasyPrint, we need to find the fonts available for fontconfig. Quite easy, the Wikipedia page for fontconfig gives us a wonderful list of command-line utilities, with the very useful fc-list and fc-match.

liZe on 14 Mar 2016

👍1

yes. sounds pretty logic. I'll give it a try.
btw @liZe answer sounds like a good addition to the weasyprint documentation for the section fonts.
thanks!

andrecastro0o on 14 Mar 2016