[Fontconfig] Re: fixed width fonts appear bold

[Andrei A. Voropaev]

On Tue, Mar 28, 2006 at 10:22:54AM -0500, Patrick Lam wrote:
> Andrei A. Voropaev wrote:
[...]
> >> For a long time now I strugle with support for bitmap fonts in GTK
> >> applications. Finally I've installed newer fontconfig library (version
> >> 2.32) and added link to /etc/fonts/conf.d/yes-bitmaps.conf. So now in
> >> font selection dialog I see family Fixed. There are various styles for
> >> it. But when I try to select style SemiCondensed I get bold font. In
> >> fact there's style "Bold SemiCondensed", but they both appear to be the
> >> same. What could be the problem here?
> > 
> > I guess here, knowing of the correspondence between font name (Fixed 12)
> > and the actual file from which this font comes would be of great help.
> > Is there some debugging options that I could set to get this
> > information? Or can I obtain it using fc-list for example?
> 
> fc-list : family file might be what you want...

Ok. Finally I was able to resolve the issue. Most likely it's not as
elegant as it could be, but here's what I did for the record or when
someone else has similar problem.

In local.conf

        <match target="font">
                <test qual="all" name="family" compare="eq">
                        <string>Fixed</string>
                </test>
                <test qual="all" target="pattern" name="size" compare="not_eq">
                        <int>12</int>
                </test>
                <edit name="file" binding="strong">
                        <string>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/6x13.pcf.gz</string>
                </edit>
                <edit name="style" binding="strong">
                        <const>87</const>
                </edit>
                <edit name="scalable" binding="strong">
                        <bool>false</bool>
                </edit>
        </match>

This allows me to get exactly the font I like. The uglienness of this is
that to edit some text containing Japanese I can't use semicondensed
font, so to get the regular width I have to request the font as "Fixed 12".

But it works.

Now some philosophical conclusions. As far as I can see, GTK +
fontconfig do very good job in guessing which font would be the best,
when there's no input from the user. But after application is started,
the user usually knows which available font is better, than the guessed one
and definetely he wants to be able to select this specific font. At this
point GTK+fontconfig fail miserably. It's pretty much impossible to
select the font the user wants. Even in MS Windows I can select the font
that I want in one click. In this respect old system of XLFD worked much
better.  There at least, after identifying font in xfontsel, I know for
sure that I'll get it in the application.

No, I don't complain. Just wonder, why things go such an inefficient
way. Is it that GTK font selector is so limited, or is it because
fontconfig does not allow such an obvious action as selecting specific
font?

-- 
Minds, like parachutes, function best when open