[Fontconfig] Localizing font family and style names

Keith Packard keithp at keithp.com
Wed Dec 1 05:05:25 EST 2004


Around 11 o'clock on Nov 30, Owen Taylor wrote:

> But if Keith can figure out how to provide multiple font names in 
> FC_FAMILY in a way that legacy apps won't get confused, that's even
> better.

I think just stuffing them as additional values in the same element should 
work just fine; I don't expect existing applications ever look beyond 
value 0.  We can give this a try in the development branch of fontconfig 
and see if any serious issues crop up.  If so, we'll have to go back and 
rethink the whole issue.  Placing the names in another element will 
greatly complicated the already arcane matching algorithm.

The question then becomes what value gets to live in position 0.  I suggest
that we accept the font designers whim and just order the names in the same
way they appear in the font.  This would assume the font designer had some
intent as to the 'preferred' name for the font and placed it first.

> (*) Side issue is that TrueType fonts allow the localization of style
>     names, don't know how that fits into the picture. It doesn't
>     really matter for Pango, since Pango canonicalizes to a fixed
>     set of style names that can be translated with gettext().

I think it's all the same problem, except that applications will generally 
want to provide the localized name for styles while I think they should 
provide the 'natural' name of the font.

-keith


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