[Fontconfig] Problem with the 9x18 XFree86 bitmap font

[Toby]

Dear Fontconfig list,

I am experiencing a bug with Fontconfig and XFree86's misc bitmap fonts
in Debian Stable.  I need help with understanding whether this is a
misconfiguration on my part, a XFree86 bug, a Fontconfig bug or a bug
introduced by Debian maintainers in the packaging of one of the above.


Issue: I don't seem to be able to select the 9x18 'misc' bitmap font in
Fontconfig, because it gets confused with (masked by) other fonts.

The 9x18 font I'd like to use is provided by the xfonts-base Debian
package (part of XFree86 4.3.0) in the four following files:

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/9x18{,B,-ISO8859-1,B-ISO8859-1}.pcf.gz

The problem is that Fontconfig (Debian's 2.3.2) assigns the same
facename and same attributes, except maybe for 'charset' and 'lang', to
several other fonts: 18x18ja, 18x18ko...  as can be seen from this grep
invocation on the relevant fonts.cache-1: 

$ grep "Fixed-12:style=Regular:slant=0:weight=80:width=100:pixelsize=18:
spacing=110:foundry=Misc:antialias=False:index=0:outline=False:scalable=
False:dpi=100"  /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/fonts.cache-1
"18x18ja.pcf.gz" ...
"18x18ko.pcf.gz" ...
"9x18-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz" ...
"9x18.pcf.gz" ...

According to Murphy's law, asking for Fixed-12 yields the wrong one:

$ fc-match Fixed-12:pixelsize=18 
18x18ja.pcf.gz: "Fixed" "Regular"

Adding more attributes does nothing, since they are the same in both the
wanted and the unwanted fonts.
Admittedly the 'lang' attribute of those fonts is different, but I've
not been able to use it in a fontconfig pattern to match the 9x18 font.

I'm currently using a modified  ~/.fonts.cache-1  in which I've given a
different facename to the 9x18 font, but that's clearly not a solution.


Any advice?  How can I exploit the difference in the lang attribute to
match 9x18 instead of 18x18?

Is this a Fontconfig, XFree86 and/or Debian bug?


Toby

-- 
UNIX is a lever for the intellect.
			-John R. Mashey