[Fontconfig] fontconfig 2.2.3 only works with iso8859-1

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2005-02-25 at 16:19 +0100, Haakon Riiser wrote:
> [Owen Taylor]
> 
> > Haakon Riiser wrote:
> > >I have a collection of old bitmap fonts (BDF format) that I'd like
> > >to use with fontconfig.  The problem is that the fonts' glyphs
> > >are replaced with some other system font when CHARSET_REGISTRY
> > >and CHARSET_ENCODING is not equal to "ISO8859" and "1".  I tried
> > >setting LC_ALL to all sorts of things, but that didn't have
> > >any effect.  The fonts in question are in IBM codepage 437; in
> > >this particular case, I could just edit the fonts and specify
> > >ISO8859-1, but I don't understand why I have to lie about the
> > >charset to please fontconfig.
> > >
> > >Is this a bug, or can I fix it by editing ~/.fonts.conf or
> > >something like that?  Btw, my OS is Slackware Linux 10.1, which
> > >uses X.org 6.8.1.
> > 
> > Neither a bug nor something you can fix without reencoding the
> > fonts to Unicode (ISO10646-1). fontconfig only supports a couple of 
> > encodings other than Unicode.
> > 
> > The complexity and overhead to support all the encodings that BDF fonts
> > are found in just doesn't make sense considering their legacy
> > status.
> 
> Just using the font as if it were ISO10646-1 would be good enough.
> Should't that be a trivial patch?  It is, at least, much better than
> the current behavior, which I don't see any use for.

To this I can only reply:

 Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

If an input stream has a ³ in it, then that should come out as a ³
or nothing. It should never come out as a │. 

Misencoding input text in order to match a misencoded (or
misinterpreted) font is one of the ultimate evils of the font and
text handling world.

Regards,
						Owen