Re: Style and Family

[David McCann-2]

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 13:28 -0500, Barry Schwartz wrote:

> Those names probably need to go in the "Preferred Family" and
> "Preferred Subfamily" name fields, but don't be surprised if your
> software is extremely broken in handling of font names.

"Extremely broken" sums it up exactly. It seems that style can be
anything relating to weight, or italic or oblique, but other things
won't work. The obvious solution is to do what DejaVu does, and specify
a condensed or small-caps variant as a separate font. This works in some
programs (e.g. Gedit, the Gimp, the Opcion font viewer), but others
(e.g. OpenOffice, Dia, and Gnucharmap) seize on the first part of the
name. Even this misbehaviour is not consistent: DejaVu Sans Condensed is
read as DejaVu Sans, but Fontin SmallCaps is distinguished from Fontin.

The Preferred Family and Preferred Subfamily tags are apparently used to
prevent similar problems in Windows.


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[Barry Schwartz-2]

David McCann <david@...> skribis:

> > Those names probably need to go in the "Preferred Family" and
> > "Preferred Subfamily" name fields, but don't be surprised if your
> > software is extremely broken in handling of font names.
>
> "Extremely broken" sums it up exactly. It seems that style can be
> anything relating to weight, or italic or oblique, but other things
> won't work. The obvious solution is to do what DejaVu does, and specify
> a condensed or small-caps variant as a separate font. This works in some
> programs (e.g. Gedit, the Gimp, the Opcion font viewer), but others
> (e.g. OpenOffice, Dia, and Gnucharmap) seize on the first part of the
> name. Even this misbehaviour is not consistent: DejaVu Sans Condensed is
> read as DejaVu Sans, but Fontin SmallCaps is distinguished from Fontin.

A lot of these things happen because programs (including GIMP) are
using fontconfig to "solve" a problem it wasn't made to solve. In
GIMP, you want to get at a particular font, but fontconfig is designed
primarily to make sure you get glyphs for a particular
language/script. This is not what I want when I am making a PNG image,
but is great in a web browser, for instance. Some of the things fc
does are IMO just wrong (such as what's likely the cause of the
confusion between DejaVu Condensed and uncondensed), but they do not
cause fc to fail in its main task.

IMO a program like GIMP shouldn't use the fontconfig pattern matcher
at all, but fc still is a great way to get a list of fonts and some
information about them. I have been told that XeTeX does this, and it
looks to me as if Scribus does this for the story editor.

I patch my fontconfig to work around GIMP-like problems, though I have
made no attempt to make the patch useful for people with different
needs than my own:
http://home.comcast.net/~crudfactory/fontfig-patch.2009.08.17.21.25.06.diff



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