Explain the GTK+ developers' thinking about detecting fixed-width fonts

and about making some tree view item behaviors settable by applications.

svn path=/trunk/; revision=6227

gtk2/STATUS

@@ -17,11 +17,51 @@ GtkText ==> GtkTextView conversion : done
 Remaining problems :
 
 - gtk_font_selection_dialog_set_filter doesn't exist anymore (but hasn't
-  been removed from the documentation). I don't know how to filter the
-  font selection dialog to get only fixed width fonts ;
+  been removed from the documentation).  There is no way to filter the
+  font selection to get only fixed width fonts; in a message at
 
-- we have to remove GUI prefs which are not usefule anymore : tree line
-  style and tree expander style ;
+	http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2002-July/msg00202.html
+
+  Owen Taylor explains why Pango (and hence GTK+ 2.0) doesn't know what
+  fonts are fixed-width and what fonts aren't:
+
+	From: Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>                                  
+	To: Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>                           
+	Cc: gtk-devel-list.gnome.org                                    
+	Subject: Re: fonts in gtk-2.0/pango                             
+	Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2002 10:06:52 -0400 (EDT)
+
+		...
+
+	> Second observation: Pango has an elaborate classification system for
+	> fonts, but this system has some serious blind spots.  So far as I can
+	> tell, Pango maintains no record of whether a font is monospaced or
+	> proportional.  (I believe the X11 backend to pango reads this
+	> information when it queries the X server for available fonts, but then
+	> throws it away.)  I presume this has something to do with its failure
+	> to provide correct metrics for Lucida Typewriter.  I presume, too,
+	> that it has something to do with the removal of the "filter" mechanism
+	> on the GTK font selection dialog between 1.2 and 2.0.  That is, you
+	> used to be able to specify that the font selection should show only
+	> monospaced fonts (rather essential for terminal/console type
+	> applications) but you can't any more -- I guess, because pango has no
+	> notion of what's a monospaced font and what's not.
+
+	Give us code that can distinguish reliably between monospaced and
+	not-monospaced fonts for Type1 and TrueType fonts and at that
+	point it becomes reasonable to think about such an API. It's
+	not all that easy to do.
+
+	Even then, there are still problems - Pango by default will
+	draw characters not in the main font using fallback fonts --
+	whose metrics almost certainly don't match your grid. So,
+	you'd have to be able to turn this off.
+
+- we have to remove GUI prefs which are not useful anymore, such as the
+  tree line style and tree expander style.  Those two items aren't
+  settable in GTK+ 2.0's new tree view widget, as the GTK+ developers
+  consider them per-user preferences rather than items that should be
+  set by individual applications.
 
 - double click on item in protocol tree doesn't expand or collapse its
   subtree ;