[Fontconfig] A question about font styles

[Keith Packard]

Around 18 o'clock on Mar 7, Ambrose Li wrote:

> Option (4) tries to come up with a combined font name that describes
> all its attributes. Then use this artificial font name (which includes
> the original attributes) to do font selection.

That wasn't what I intended to describe.  I was thinking that we'd examine 
the face name provided and then select bits from the slant/weight values 
which weren't expressed in the style name.  So, if you ask for face name 
"black", weight 'bold' and slant 'italic', the requested weight would be 
overridden by the expressed style but the slant would be used to select a 
black italic face.  Note that I also suggested that this seemed more 
confusing than just having style name override weight and slant values.

I agree that option 5) seems even more fragile; depending on extracting 
unexpressed varients in the face name and merging them with the family 
name.  The alternative would be to just use Postscript Fullname and ignore 
styles altogether.  That's where Windows has pushed many fonts.

I see CSS2 style/weight values as less-precise than face names and I'd 
really like to see applications move towards just using the face names 
when asking the user to select a style.  Font substitution is a different 
matter; for that, you'd extract the face name, style and weight and hand 
them back to fontconfig which would prefer fonts with a matching face name 
and fall back to fonts with the nearest available style and weight.

I guess I don't see why having two separate and well defined mechanisms 
for selecting a font variant is all that bad; applications will likely 
have clear reasons to prefer one over the other in different situations.

-keith


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