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

[Ambrose Li]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 06:19:47AM -0700, Michael A. Peters
wrote:

> The family has 22 styles - [...] All claim to be regular face
> within their family.

[...]

> 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?

No. There is absolutely no way to fix this problem because this
is a design decision in fontconfig.

In fact this annoying (and IMHO very serious) usability problem
had been brought up before (a very common problem with the free
Chinese fonts as well as random commercial fonts).  I (and
IIRC some others) tried to convince people on this list that
fontconfig *must* provide a way to describe things like "the
bold font of font X is font Y".  Unfortunately, it was thought
that this could be a "trademark problem".

I could not and still cannot understand this. From my "user's
viewpoint", fontconfig is less capable than the long-obsolete
"WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS" that was released more than 15 years
ago.

For CJK, this problem is so bad that bold and italic absolutely
do not work on fontconfig-based systems.  (For English at least
many of the default fonts have bold and italic versions fontconfig
can recognize.)  If you use an application or web site that uses
boldness or italicness to show you important information, you are
lost if you don't speak European languages.


-- 
Ambrose LI Cheuk-Wing  <a.c.li at ieee.org>

http://ada.dhs.org/~acli/