[Fontconfig] Improving Latin font selection for CJK locales

Behdad Esfahbod behdad at behdad.org
Tue Jan 29 00:53:26 PST 2008


On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 02:20 -0500, Pat Suwalski wrote:
> Qianqian Fang wrote:
> > the proposed method sounds quite interesting and useful.
> > For font developers, I think it will add the power to fine-tune
> > the font selections, particularly for massaging CJK fonts with
> > Latin fonts. I would like to give my full support on this effort.
> 
> We ran into this exact issue when working on the eeePC.
> 
> In the en_US.UTF-8 locale, the latin font was a nicely-hinted DejaVu 
> Sans, with properly bitmap-hinted Chinese characters as needed from 
> other fonts.
> 
> In the zh_TW.UTF-8 and zh_CN.UTF-8 locales, it would always use the 
> latin characters from the fonts made for Chinese, which had a rather 
> ugly bitmap-hinted serif font.
> 
> Using some fontconfig XML hackery, we got it to work nice in most 
> applications, but sometimes the ugly latin characters in the Chinese 
> fonts still show up.

Hi Pat,

Note that the request here is to allow such a behavior.  Qianqian has
been looking for a way to force Pango to use the bitmap Latin glyphs in
the Chinese font for Latin.  That's what Pango currently can't be
instructed to do without changing the default Latin font for en_US
locales too.


> --Pat
-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759



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