[Fontconfig] Aliases

Keith Packard keithp at keithp.com
Wed Mar 31 08:17:35 EST 2004


Around 22 o'clock on Mar 30, Adam Sampson wrote:

> It seems a shame to leave out a useful feature just because it *could*
> be used maliciously; obviously fontconfig shouldn't be allowed to look
> at ~/.fonts for fonts because it makes it easier for the user to
> install unlicensed fonts without the sysadmin's permission. ;)

The goal wasn't to leave out visible aliases, the goal was to provide
match-only aliases so that you *could* map trademarked names to existing
fonts without causing problems.  This means we can ship things that map
'Times' to 'Timmons' or 'Times New Roman' to 'Nimbus Roman No9 L' while
avoiding having 'Times' appear in the font list and causing confusion. This
has been helpful when trying to present documents made in other
environments by ensuring that things layout (and look) the same.

However, perhaps we should think about how we might create a mechanism 
for 'visible aliases' which would be returned by the listing functions.

-keith


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 228 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/attachments/20040330/da36afb3/attachment.pgp


More information about the Fontconfig mailing list