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

[Michael A. Peters]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 19:38 -0400, Ambrose Li wrote:

> 
> 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".

Ouch. The only way I could see it being a Trademark problem would be if
fontconfig shipped with a configuration matching different font families
together in this way, but I'm not a lawyer.

I suppose I can modify the fonts themselves - but some fonts
specifically prohibit this.

LaTeX can do this just via virtual fonts.

Elsner+Flake is a pretty big foundry, since they intentionally are
packaging fonts this way - a lot of applications are going to be more
difficult to use unless the application itself is able to figure it out.

> 
> 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.

I personally only speak one language (I'd actually like to learn Korean
at some point), but yes - that sounds like a very serious problem to me.