[Fontconfig] Lucida Sans/Grande/Unicode matching confusion

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On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 04:45, Raimund Steger <rs at mytum.de> wrote:
> If all you want is an alias for "Lucida Sans", the following in
> ~/.fonts.conf should work:
> ...

Thanks! I mention both Lucida Sans and Lucida Grande in one alias and
it seems to work:
 <alias>
  <family>Lucida Sans</family>
  <family>Lucida Grande</family>
  <accept>
   <family>Lucida Sans Unicode</family>
  </accept>
 </alias>

> However: The spelling "Lucida Sans" is used by TTF fonts bundled with
> certain Sun software (Solaris, JDK), so maybe you already have them, and
> adding something like
>
>  <dir>/usr/java/jre/lib/fonts</dir> ...

There don't appear to be any fonts in my "IcedTea6" OpenJDK.

> Whether fontconfig needs new
> default rules for Lucida or even a new generic family name, I don't know.

The current behavior isn't "do the right thing" for a naive user. If I
install a font that is obviously much closer to other font families
than the O.S. default, it's strange that fontconfig doesn't pick it
unless I write some configuration info.

The rule /etc/fonts/conf.avail/30-metric-aliases.conf does the right
thing to "alias similar/metric-compatible families from various
sources" for the big guns Helvetica-Times-Courier, maybe the Lucida
Sans discontinuity between Windows, Mac, & Java is important enough to
add it. But then why not Garamond-alikes, Futura variants, etc. as
well.

Is fontconfig even intended to know about font families that aren't
installed so it can pick the closest matching font given a name?
That's been the PANOSE/OS2 sFamilyClass dream for decades; it seems
from a few web documents using the abandoned CSS panose-1 property
that Lucida and Lucida Sans share the same "2 11 6 2 3 5 4 2 2 4"
panose-1 digits.

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