[Fontconfig] Nimbus Sans L Condensed

[Felix Miata]

On 2008/03/04 12:11 (GMT-0500) Bob Tennent apparently typed:

>Felix Miata wrote:

>  >|What systems did you test on that makes you think this font is
>  >|installed "on every Linux system"?

> It's one of the urw base35 clones that ghostscript depends on. Do 

> locate n019043l.pfb 

> on any Linux system. Or 

> xlsfonts | grep 'nimbus sans l-medium-r-condensed'.  

> But applications like Firefox don't see it.

I did more checking. FF can see it, assuming correct system configuration to
serve it up via fontconfig.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/attachment.cgi?id=198668 is from Mandriva Cooker,
which matches back at least as far as v2007.0. It doesn't work in any other
distros I checked, but Mandriva apparently has proven it possible.

KDE seems to think it's a TT font, but I suppose that's a bug, since the only
such font I can locate in the fonts trees in /usr is n019043l.pfb.

For systems over which you have no control, and for current and near future,
I suggest using arial narrow as a CSS fallback for cases where more M$ fonts
are installed than just the basic web fonts.

For the long term, maybe filing some bugs against the various distros, like
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=367188 on SUSE, could improve things.

Another possible approach: a campaign to get the DejaVu project to add a
narrow or extra condensed sans to its suite would improve the Linux font
selection down the road sometime. Right now it has a condensed sans, but that
only shrinks its Verdana work-alike down to the size of lower case Arial.
-- 
"Let us not love with words or in talk only.
Let us love by what we do." 1 John 3:18 NLV

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/