[Fontconfig] How to disable the "global advance" for CJK fonts?

[Ambrose Li]

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 01:57:56PM -0800, Keith Packard wrote:
> 
> Feel free to send along more family names that need this treatment and 
> I'll stick 'em in the next release.

I believe currently (for whatever reason I don't think this used to
be the case) all the Arphic fonts need to have global advance disabled.
With some others familiar ones, at least the following common fonts
must have "global advance" disabled:

	AR PL KaitiM Big5
	AR PL SungtiL GB
	AR PL Mingti2L Big5
	AR PL KaitiM GB
	Kochi Gothic
	Kochi Mincho
	Ming(for ISO10646)	[i.e., HK government's reference font]
	MS Hei
	MS Song

There are also other free and freeware fonts that don't work, e.g.,
Mikachan, Y.OzFont, MT_TARE.

(I don't know whether the Win2000 equivalents of the above MS fonts
would cause problems; I don't have them for checking.  MS Gothic,
plus the Baekmuk and Wang fonts, do not seem to be affected.)

But I think the real question we should as is: Why do we need to do
this at all? All these fonts work right out of the box in Windows
(any version from Win95 onwards) and it seems also in Mac OSX, and
many of these are system fonts in Linux and/or Windows. I tend to
feel that we (i.e., the Free Software side) must be doing something
fundamentally wrong, or at least something "de-factoly" wrong. We
seem to be dealing with an "exception" list of unknown length and
the list will be growing and it will never be complete.

Some time ago, iirc, someone else proposed on this list that global
advance be turned off by default for all CJK fonts; from what I
observe that would be an entirely reasonable thing, and I'd like to
know any technical reason why that should not be the case.

Regards,
- Ambrose