In preperation for the talk in Feb at CodeCon and having finsihed the tests at work for another 6 months, I decided to try and look at using MagicPoint to start writing the slides. I’m anticipating this wil take a while and as it also means learning about MagicPoint starting now is possibly leaving it a little late, but then why change the habits of a lifetime now?

It all started (as these things do) well enough and I actually got slides on the screen within minutes! Yay! Then I found I couldn’t get the fonts to work the way I wanted them to. I also thought it would be fun to bring over a nice font I have in Windows, one that’s extremely clear to read and scales well to larger sizes making it (I think) ideal for the slides. Copying the truetype files across was easy, and I even managed to get it installed. Of course after about an hour of playing I can’t get magicPoint to use it!

This is part of the problem with X11. Recent incarnations of X11 have been getting and better, but it’s just too damned complicated for a lot of general day to day chores. It took me quite a while to figure out where the config files were for my installation as it’s X.org not the XF86 codebase that FreeBSD 5 uses. I got there, but it was a frustrating time and time I would have better spent working on the content of my slides! Until the people who are developing X11 start to pay attention and make things easier widespread adoption is always going to be a pipe dream. Users don’t want to spend over an hour to simply install a font. Nor do they want to have to run this app to get this file, then this file to do… Let’s face it, a lot of you know what I’m talking about!