[Fontconfig] Font styles and familes - match and replace?

[Michael A. Peters]

It seems that a common trend (new or not I don't know) is to release
fonts in the same family with unique family names.

Just bought a family called Wastrel that imho is a much nicer font than
Comic Sans MS for viewing websites that want a sans script font.

The family has 22 styles - all individually named. I quickly removed the
fonts I am unlikely to use (ie Expanded Outline Oblique ) and just
installed the common four (regular, bold, oblique, bold oblique). All
claim to be regular face within their family.

Fire up AbiWord. Hitting the "bold" button does nothing, I have to
choose Wastrel Bold to get Bold. Hitting Italic results in fake italic,
not the real oblique.

Is there a way to set up matching so that when I ask for bold attribute
in the standard face by selecting "Bold" button, it gets it from Wastrel
Bold?

I tried the following:

<match target="pattern">
  <test qual="any" name="family">
    <string>Wastrel</string>     
  </test>
  <match target="pattern">
  <test qual="any" name="style">
    <string>Bold</string>
  </test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign">
      <string>Wastrel Bold</string>
    </edit>
    <edit name="style" mode="assign">
      <string>Normal</string>
    </edit>
  </match>
</match>

Doesn't seem to cut it. I'm not a fontconfig expert though, typically I
only touch my ~/.font.config file to make an alias. Any suggestions?

It's not a big deal, but I'd like to get bold when I press the bold
button - and not have to select the bold font from the menu to get bold.

-=-
I also just bought LucidaMonoEFOP family.
It does the same thing - four families

LucidaMonoEFOP-Regular
LucidaMonoEFOP-Bold

etc. as the family names.

The documentation that it came with stated to choose the style by
selecting the individual font - and that they are doing that for
"compatibility" reasons.

-=- (from their doc)
"To guarantee compatibility on both Mac and PC platforms, this font was
manufactured as »Single Font«. The choice of the font must be made via
the »Font Menu«. If you choose a style like Italic or Bold through the
»Style« Menu, you will get an electronic modification instead of a true
design."
-=-

I don't know what compatibility issues they speak of ... but anyway, it
seems that they (Elsner+Flake) have made a design decision that all or
most (at least OpenType) fonts will be done this way.

With the new conf.d/ structure, when I make my rpms for my fonts - it
would be nice to include a file that allows bold/oblique/bold-oblique to
be used when the normal/roman face is selected and a style button is
selected. It would be really nice to also be able to then hide those
other styles from the menu but I'll settle for just being able to bold
something by typing Ctrl-B like I can with many fonts.

Thanks for suggestions.