[DejaVu-bugs] [Bug 12735] Condensed faces not recognized in KDE

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12735


bl.bugs at gmail.com changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
          Component|Sans                        |Experimental fonts
            Summary|DejaVuSans Condensed not    |Condensed faces not
                   |recognized in KDE 3.7.5     |recognized in KDE




------- Comment #1 from bl.bugs at gmail.com  2007-10-08 08:39 PST -------
I'm copying this from the gentoo forums where I explained the situation:

I'll try to explain what exactly is happening, but first some background
information: 

 Fonts have a "family" and a "subfamily" (also referred to as style here) name.
A family name is something like "Arial" or "DejaVu Sans", the subfamily
something like "Regular", or "Bold". 

 Now, many fonts (and DejaVu is one of them), have also a "preferred family"
and a "preferred subfamily". Now, why would these be in a font? 

 One word: legacy problems. Too many systems are built assuming there are only
four subfamilies in a font: "regular", "bold", "italic" and "bold italic". But
many font families have more styles, sometimes "outline", sometimes "extra
bold", or "condensed regular/bold/..." as in DejaVu. 

 Since you want these styles in the same font, and you don't want to break
existing programs, and keep the possibility there to use those extra styles,
but you want new programs to be able to see the other styles in the same font
family, they added the preferred (sub)family names to a font. I give an
example: 

 font in this example is: DejaVu Sans Condensed Bold 
 family: DejaVu Sans Condensed 
 subfamily: Bold 
 preferred family: DejaVu Sans 
 preferred subfamily: Condensed Bold 

 So, new programs use the preferred ones (and so Condensed Bold will be part of
the big DejaVu Sans family). Old programs don't know about those preferred ones
and use the regular family/subfamily. Those old programs will have an extra
font family called "DejaVu Sans Condensed". 

 Okay, so far the introduction... 

 With info given above it looks like it works everywhere and everyone is happy,
but: 

 Enter the world of fonts on Linux... Probably the first program that's
important for it is FontConfig. It's basically used to manage all your fonts,
and to tell other programs what fonts are on your system. 

 FontConfig used to be one of the "old" programs I told about above. But they
changed it some time ago, now it's taking the preferred families if they are
available. 

 Unfortunately there's one flaw in this whole system: it assumes all
libraries/programs linking to it can deal with it, and you have guessed it,
that's not the case. 

 So, as a result all programs based on Qt3 (and hence KDE) can't see the
Condensed family anymore (since Qt3 doesn't handle condensed styles), and
unfortunately there's no easy way to fix that. KControl won't even show


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