[Fontconfig] fontconfig 2.2.3 only works with iso8859-1

[Owen Taylor]

Haakon Riiser wrote:
> I have a collection of old bitmap fonts (BDF format) that I'd like
> to use with fontconfig.  The problem is that the fonts' glyphs
> are replaced with some other system font when CHARSET_REGISTRY
> and CHARSET_ENCODING is not equal to "ISO8859" and "1".  I tried
> setting LC_ALL to all sorts of things, but that didn't have
> any effect.  The fonts in question are in IBM codepage 437; in
> this particular case, I could just edit the fonts and specify
> ISO8859-1, but I don't understand why I have to lie about the
> charset to please fontconfig.
> 
> Is this a bug, or can I fix it by editing ~/.fonts.conf or
> something like that?  Btw, my OS is Slackware Linux 10.1, which
> uses X.org 6.8.1.

Neither a bug nor something you can fix without reencoding the
fonts to Unicode (ISO10646-1). fontconfig only supports a couple of 
encodings other than Unicode.

The complexity and overhead to support all the encodings that BDF fonts
are found in just doesn't make sense considering their legacy
status.

Regards,
					Owen