[crossfire] extended info markup language

[Mark Wedel]

  while on this topic:

  The tags (and for that matter, gtk1 client) have the idea of different fonts - 
from the mediatags file:

[fixed]         set the font to fixed width
[arcane]        set the font to a magical one
[hand]          set the font to hand writing
[strange]       set the font to 'strange unknown language'
[print]         set the font to the client default one

  A few questions/notes:

for the 'strange' font, is it meant to be literal/readable?  For example, if I 
have '[strange]this is a short message', with the ideal strange font, should a 
person be able to read that and understand it, or should it appear basically as 
gibberish?  If the later, is the assumption then that the text using it should 
also be gibberish, eg, '[strange]adsf kj23 adf la zxdv 12' type of thing?  It 
gets sort of odd, because if the user doesn't have a strange font installed, 
things will fall back to normal font, and thus be in standard roman characters.

  Second question related to that - the gtk1 client has a list of a bunch of 
different fonts to use for arcane, hand, and strange.  At least on my system 
(fedora core 5), I don't have any of those fonts, so I'll just get the normal fonts.

  Are their pointers where users can get those fonts?  If the fonts are GPL, 
would it make sense to have a crossfire-fonts package to have the different 
fonts?  The idea of these different fonts is nice, but if no one has them, and 
no one knows where to get them, doesn't do much good.

  With x/gnome, adding fonts I think is a bit of a pain (really want to put the 
fonts where the system expects them - hard to load them up from some custom 
directory).  For the gtk2 client, I'm letting pango do the work, so just need to 
provide the font family.

  Lastly, I wonder if it worthwhile to add tags for any of the following:

font size - there is bold and italics, but nothing to increase size.  If this is 
done, I think the size would have to be relative to the base font size, eg:
[fontsize=+2] - increase font size 2 points over base size
[fontsize=0] - set font size to base size
[fontsize=-2] - set font size smaller than base size

  When I say base size, I suppose meaning that the client is running with 14 
point fonts, and adjust from that.

underline: is supported - would it make sense?

  You can look at:
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkTextTag.html
scroll down a few lines to the Properties box - those are properties we could 
easily set, but I don't think there are many others that make sense.