[Fontconfig] [RFC] Fontconfig lang-specific font override

[Owen Taylor]

On Sun, 2006-06-11 at 14:11 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Here is the solution I've arrived for Fedora Extras DejaVu packaging :
> - making DejaVu the fontconfig default
> - optionally substituting other fonts for Arabic or Farsi, for people
> unsatisfied with DejaVu current Arabic block
> 
> I'm far from sure this is the right solution or a simpler one is not
> possible, but unless a fontconfig guru will point me to a better
> solution this is the one which will ship in FE next week (and possibly
> later in FC6). I've gone as far as I could alone.

Well, you've been told the right solution repeatedly ... not shipping
on omnibus multi-script font.

What you've attached here looks incredibly fragile and confusing to 
users. I'm not enough of a fontconfig expert to predict exactly
what will happen from all this configuration, but I think it's pretty
poor if, say, someone running in a Persian locale doesn't *get* 
DejaVu if they select it explicitly. (As opposed to selecting 
sans-serif)

As long as the fonts people really want to use for their locales don't
include Latin characters, they can usually get around a multi-block
font by just specifying DejaVu after the desired font. But if the
desired fonts do have (frequently poor) Latin characters, then the
user has nothing to do.

This is leaving aside the worse problems that you are creating with
metrics.
						Owen

(I'll shut up on this topic now.)