[Fontconfig] A question about font styles

[Ambrose Li]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 08:40:42AM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:

> What font is selected when those conflict?

For the particular example I gave in the bug, the font with
lining figures is always selected.  I don't know why this is the
case; the "expert" one not being selected is probably because
it's not complete, but I don't know why it would not select the
font with oldstyle figures (perhaps it's slightly incomplete too).

BTW, "Apollo MT" is a very mild example. I have another typeface
"Poetica Chancery" with 21 fonts which is much worse: in gimp 2,
it appears as 3 instances of "Poetica" (always the same capitals
font) and 18 instances of "Poetica Italic" (always the same
italic [i.e., cursive] font). And all these (all of them having
the same weight and the same slant, except the capitals because
originally italic faces had the property that lowercase letters
are slanted but uppercase letters are not slanted) should either
be in the same family (just "Poetica", but have to be able to
select any of the 21) or else split to 21 distinct families in
order to be useful.

My feeling is that trying to map everything to the CSS model is
hopeless, unless we want to create fake font families on the fly.

Mapping font properties to CSS properties might be somewhat
fruitful, but most commercial Type 1 fonts have variants that
bear absolutely no relationship to CSS properties; there are
also some more surprising inventions from the commercial font
world, such as typefaces that distinguishes between two variants
of small caps (e.g., Emigre's "Mrs Eaves").  With the current
behaviour, commercial fonts are almost completely useless.

(I had hanged onto Gimp 1 for a very long time until I decided
to switch a few weeks ago for my tablet and also better handling
for non-Latin fonts; however, the much-worse font handling w.r.t.
Type 1 was basically the reason I was so reluctant to switch.)

Regards,
Ambrose