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

[Ambrose Li]

Hi

I should retract my statement about italics not working, as it
sort of works (slanted type synthesized) and most people would
say it works; though you would know that it does not really
work if you know what "italics" really means in typography.

On Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 08:19:38PM +0900, mpsuzuki at hiroshima-u.ac.jp wrote:
> 
> Please let me know detail of "trademark problem".
> Michael took it as legal issue, but I'm afraid you meant different.
> I don't think it's less-problematic to distribute information
> "about" commercial fonts, if they don't have non-public part of
> the commercial fonts. I suppose what you meant was comprehensive
> research for existing commercial font is difficult work.
> If I'm misunderstanding, please correct.

As I understood it it is indeed "legal", or rather possibility to
being sued. (I would say abuse of the legal system by commercial
companies.) The response I got was:

>From fontconfig-bounces at lists.freedesktop.org Mon Mar  7 13:27:08 2005
>
>Around 13 o'clock on Mar 7, Ambrose Li wrote:
>
>> I have been wondering whether someone has entertained the idea
>> that fontconfig (or some other layer) can have a config file
>> that specifies something like "the italic version of this
>> font is that font" or "the bold version of this font is that
>> font", or, "to get CJK/Cyrillic/Hebrew/Arabic characters from
>> this font, use that font".
>
>You can do this when matching fonts, but you can't change what names are 
>returned for each font.  I've avoided this strenuously because of 
>trademark issues; font vendors get very nervous when you talk about 
>representing their fonts with different names.
>
>-keith