[Freetype] Re: Suggested patch: bitmap fonts, foundry, family and fontconfig/Xft2

[Mike FABIAN]

Juliusz Chroboczek <address@hidden> さんは書きました:

> MF> I believe it would be better if the family name which shows up via the
> MF> fontconfig/Xft2 API reflected that and the fonts showed up as
>
> MF>     "Misc Fixed", "Sony Fixed", "Etl Fixed", etc...
>
> I believe this to be a bad idea -- the family names of Type 1 and BDF
> versions of Adobe Courier will then differ.

That is one of the points of my idea. The Type1 version is still
called "Courier" and the Bitmap version is called "Adobe Courier" and
thus usually not selected, at least not by accident.

If the family names of the Type1 and BDF fonts of Courier, Times, and
Helvetica are the same, you may get a bitmap font even if a scalable
font of the same name is available.

> I believe that this is a fontconfig/Gnome bug, not something that
> should be fixed at the FreeType level.

Then it is also a Qt/KDE bug. You cannot distinguish these fonts in
the Qt/KDE font selection dialogs either.

> MF> TrueType fonts don't have something like "FOUNDRY",
>
> Yes, they do, in the OS/2 table.  Keith is planning to modify
> Fontconfig to properly export this value.

But this alone doesn't help, it remains mostly useless until
all of the GUI font selection dialogs support it. And all of the
config files. Currently a font specification in qtrc and other
Qt/KDE config files typically looks like

     font=Bitstream Vera Sans,10,-1,5,48,0,0,0,0,0

You cannot write

     font=Bitstream Vera Sans:pizelsize=10:hinting=true

etc, Qt cannot parse this information correctly. Therefore
being able to specify

     "Misc:foundry=Fixed"

wouldn't help. The same appears to be the case for ~/.gtkrc-2.0
and other GTK/Gnome config files.

> MF> My patch avoids this by appending " Wide" to fonts which have an
> MF> AVERAGE_WIDTH >= POINT_SIZE in the bdf-properties,
>
> MF> What do you think?
>
> I don't know.  My gut instinct is that AVERAGE_WIDTH should not be
> used for anything at all, and also that one shouldn't munge font names
> lightly.  I suggest you add a new fontconfig property for wide fonts
> instead -- this would be a purely fontconfig-level change.

This would need to be supported by all font selection dialogs and
config files as well.

Currently it just doesn't work well if you have a lot of bitmap fonts
in the font-path of Xft. Both the many different foundries which all
share the family name "Fixed" and the existence of double width only
fonts make it almost impossible to select the bitmap font one really
wants.

-- 
Mike Fabian   <address@hidden>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。