[Fontconfig] Confused about Embolden

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Hi,

I'm confused about Embolden.  Maybe someone can enlighten me.  I
remember getting it working for two Persian fonts Koodak and
Homa.  As it seems, from my 10-fonts-persian.conf that is
included in fontconfig branch now, I did that by setting embolden
to true in the config file unconditionally for this fonts.

Now I cannot get embolding working anymore, neither with branch
fontconfig, nor with FC4 fontconfig.  I remember testing it
working with Mozilla/Firefox/Epiphany.

Anyway, I would like to know:

  * Whether emblden means "artifically embolden this font now",
or "artificially embolden this font if the bold face is
requested", where the interpretation in the second sense is left
to applications.

  * From what I understand, the default fonts.conf should be
enough to get emboldening enabled for all fonts that don't have a
bold face, right?

  * How should the application implement emboldening?  I see
there's an item in the news for 2.3.92 release that emboldening
chaned a bit, to let cairo use it.  What was that change exactly?

Currently when Pango hands in an FcPattern with emboldening
turned on to cairo, nothing special happens.  Though that may be
a cairo bug.


Thanks,

--behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill"
	-- Dan Bern, "New American Language"