[Fontconfig] Nimbus Sans L Condensed

[Felix Miata]

On 2008/03/05 20:43 (GMT+0100) Nicolas Mailhot apparently typed:

> Le mercredi 05 mars 2008 à 14:25 -0500, Felix Miata a écrit :

>> Watch the Novell bug's resolution, then consider following it up with
>> something similar in Fedora's bugzilla and/or manually doing whatever is
>> required to fix the Novell bug.

> The Novell's bug is asking to imitate Mandriva and change an existing
> font file to workaround an application bug.

When I wrote that I wasn't aware of what Mandriva did to produce a fontconfig
providable font by the name Nimbus Sans L Condensed.

> This does not scale you'd
> need to change the family of all the popular in-the-wild condensed fonts
> (assuming their license allow it) to make condensed selection by family
> name work.

Retrofitting is obviously no solution, but stopping future hemorrhaging by
including an alias in future fontconfig releases seems reasonable to me.

>> Another good long-term solution might be if "condensed" could be another
>> property added to font-variant in the CSS specs.
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-variant

> What would be the benefit over implementing the font-stretch property
> already standardised by the w3c a few § under your link?

Nimbus Sans L doesn't need "stretching". The font files already provide a
condensed variant @ 75% width of the base called condensed. The
font-subsystem, fontconfig in this case, apparently already knows about it,
but there's apparently no means for common non-PS apps to call it.
-- 
"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/