Re: Format of -dshow-available-fonts output

[Aaron Hill]

On 2018-07-17 08:06, Urs Liska wrote:
> If I have a family of "Libre Baskerville Condensed" and the detail
> string "Libre Baskerville Condensed:style=Italic"
> this probably means the italic variant of that font. And in fact there
> are three instances of that font with three different styles.
>
> And "Monotype Modern Std,Modern MT Std 
> Condensed:style=Condensed,Regular"
> Is it possible that the styles are listed in reverse order?

FontConfig should be deterministic, but I do not believe there is any 
attempt at sorting.  On my system, consider the output from fc-list:  (I 
have very few fonts installed)

/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSerif-Bold.ttf: DejaVu 
Serif:style=Bold
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf: DejaVu Sans 
Mono:style=Book
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: DejaVu Sans:style=Book
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/AlexBrush-Regular.ttf: Alex 
Brush:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf: DejaVu 
Sans:style=Bold
/usr/share/fonts/opentype/KaushanScript-Regular.otf: Kaushan 
Script:style=Regular
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono-Bold.ttf: DejaVu Sans 
Mono:style=Bold
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSerif.ttf: DejaVu 
Serif:style=Book

The order is consistent from run to run, however it is not sorted by 
anything obvious to me.  You should probably not rely on anything in the 
ordering of entries and/or styles.  As such, it would be necessary to 
merge the results and sort them for display to the user.

> Well, it seems apart from the fact that some font files seem to be
> duplicated on my system it seems that many font families are not
> reported in one step but in multiple steps that have to be merged
> manually.
>
> I'll do some tests and may report back.

I suspect there might be other properties that are there to disambiguate 
the results, for instance code page or language support.  You could try 
running `fc-list : family familylang fontversion` for more details.  If 
you really want all the details, just use the verbose option: `fc-list 
-v`; but be prepared for a LOT of data.  ;)

-- Aaron Hill