[Fontconfig] Reg. fontconfig and adding a new font for Greek

[Keith Packard]

On Sat, 2005-08-13 at 22:18 +0300, Konstantinos Margaritis wrote:
> (Resending to the list on Keith's request)
> 
> Hi, 
>   I haven't sent this as a bug report because I'm not sure yet how to 
> do it. But here is the situation. I understand that fontconfig 
> manages the prefered font list for X, or pango or some font rendering 
> engine for that matter, I'm not really into the specifics. In general 
> this works fine, but we have a problem with greek locale el_GR, or 
> rather the display of greek glyphs. 
> 
> Unless I create a local.conf file that overrides the serif/sans-serif 
> families with the MgOpen (package ttf-mgopen) or the FreeSans 
> (ttf-freefont) fonts or any other font supporting greek glyphs), the 
> greek glyphs don't appear at all, only squares. 

Fontconfig should select a font based on the locale unless the
application overrides that by specifying a language in the font
selection pattern.

You can verify which font is selected for your locale by using

	$ fc-match :lang=el-GR

This should present the first font in your environment which fully
supports Greek.

In any case, pango should never display little boxes if you have a greek
font on your machine as it will always search through all available
fonts when the requested font is missing a glyph.

> I'd gladly send a patch, if I knew a bit more about how it works. Is 
> it just a case of adding FreeSans/FreeSerif and the MgOpen* fonts in 
> the fonts.conf? If so, FreeSans/FreeSerif is already there, but 
> apparently another font takes precedense and erroneously reports of 
> supporting greek glyphs, while it can't. I'll try to play around with 
> the priority in this, but if you know another way, then I'd be 
> interested in knowing about it.

You shouldn't have to edit your configuration to get a working font
automatically.

-keith

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/attachments/20050816/baffb44d/attachment.pgp