[Fontconfig] A question about font styles

[Owen Taylor]

Keith Packard wrote:
> Around 18 o'clock on Mar 6, Ambrose Li wrote:
> 
> 
>>I was told that "there's not much that can be done currently,
>>since the fonts don't differentiate themselves enough for
>>pango to generate unique font descriptions for them."
> 
> 
> There's the limitation -- pango doesn't expose the varients in any 
> extensible fashion, it has only two variables (weight/slant) and a limited 
> number of values for each one (2 each?).
> 
> Pango should, in addtion, provide a list of style names for each family 
> for applications which want to select by name.  As many TrueType fonts 
> provide extensive localization for these style names, it's not even a 
> terrible localization problem.
> 
> Owen just needs more people complaining so that he'll figure out how
> to provide a more comprehensive style solution.

The bug referenced in Ambrose's mail:

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95043

gives details about how I want to implement it. (See comments
6 and 9) I don't want to have overspecified font descriptions
where we have *both* a textual description of the style and also
CSS properties. What font is selected when those conflict?

I'd certainly rather if fontconfig did the work here to make fonts
conform to the CSS model. If that isn't going to happen, it can
be done at the Pango level, with some work and inefficiency.

Regards,
						Owen