[Fontconfig] Aliases

[Keith Packard]

Around 3 o'clock on Apr 1, Enrique Perez-Terron wrote:

> As far as I understood this issue, it started out with a request to be
> able to list the font names that an application can "ask for" without
> being turned down.

No.  That capability is already very well supported.  That let's people 
say "if an application asks for 'Times', please use 'Timmons'", it does 
this in a way which doesn't expose 'Times' in the list of fonts that 
applications place in menus, which allows people to avoid trademark 
problems.

If an application says "I have the Times font available" when it really
means "I have a font that looks just like Times available", that represents
a clear trademark infrigement.

So, it's nice that we have this ability to do sensible font substitution 
without forcing people to violate trademarks like the XLFD mechanism does.

However, it would *also* be nice to allow people to add names to 
application font menus and have those names directed at sensible 
substitutions.  Then we could add things like 'Sans-Serif' and have it 
displayed in application menus without having special application kludges 
everywhere.  Of course, this capability would let people add 'Times' to 
their application menus without really having the 'Times' font, but that's 
not something we should even try to prevent.

This mechanism could be as easy as a list of family names which would get 
returned whenever an application requested the available families; 
figuring out how that semantic would work will be a bit tricky as the 
listing semantics really only deals with "real" fonts that have files and 
character sets and the like.

-keith


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