[Fontconfig] Localizing font family and style names

[Xie Qian]

IMO, using the order in the font may not produce a desirable result. As the 
order of different name will affect application's font listing manner rather than
actual font matching, why don't let applications decide which order is appropriate?
I mean add a function to set preferred listing order, with following options:
    FC_LIST_LATIN_FISRT(list Latin name first)
    FC_LIST_NATIVE_FISRT(list native name first)
    FC_LIST_LOCALE_FISRT(as user's locale setting)
    FC_LIST_ORIGINAL(as in the font file)
To achieve backward compatibility, just set  FC_LIST_LATIN_FISRT as default.


Xie Qian
 
Open System and Chinese Information Processing Center,
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
P.O. Box 8718, Beijing 100080, CHINA

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Keith Packard" <keithp at keithp.com>
>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
>