[Fontconfig] Localizing font family and style names

[Keith Packard]

Around 13 o'clock on Dec 1, Federic Zhang wrote:

> In my understanding, Given one locale/lang, besides the lang set, the other
> information that fontconfig can rely on to decide the 'preferred' name/list
> is the CodePageRange data in OS/2 table. 

The other two pieces of potentially relevant information is the language 
coverage that fontconfig computes and the order in which the names appear 
in the font file.  I need to do some investigation, but I'd sure like to 
be able to reasonably expect that font designers place the 'preferred' 
names first in the file, leaving the transformed Postscript names for 
later entries.

Fontconfig already uses the code page range bits to disambiguate among Han
fonts for preferred languages, unfortunately, the code page range data is
rather limited, and also somewhat ambiguous, in the list of marked
languages, so we can't really use that as the sole source of language 
information.

> The desired sceranis is that we present APPROPRIATE and MEANINGFUL name to
> *END USER*, i.e chinese name in chinese locale. if my understanding is
> correct, we wouldn't expect germeny user will like korean name, right?

We want to provide the name which helps the user best select fonts.  For 
monolingual users in Germany, we may well want to display names of Korean 
fonts in Korean -- that will rather strongly discourage the user from 
selecting these inappropriately.  For a multi-lingual user in France, again,
we may well want to present these names in Korean as they might be easier 
to discern among multiple Korean fonts than when using the French 
translated name.  Or, as Ambrose Li suggests, we may want to present the 
names in English to both of these users as those names are what the user 
is attempting to locate.

As I don't think we can answer this question here, I submit that 
Fontconfig better just provide all of the names back to the application 
and let someone else sort it all out.

> Anyway, thanks a lot for your effort, Lars said 'it seems to be pretty important
> feature for them', actually IT IS.

Right, I've been delaying release 2.3 until I could resolve this issue.  
It's now getting a bit ridiculous that I haven't managed to do a release 
in so long, so I'm trying to spend a few days to finish this up.

Thanks to everyone for participating; I'm hoping to have a sample
implementation done in a short while.

-keith


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