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

[Owen Taylor]

On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 14:50 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le Lun 12 juin 2006 14:02, Owen Taylor a écrit :
> 
> > Well, you've been told the right solution repeatedly ... not shipping
> > on omnibus multi-script font.
> 
> Sure, the right solution to shipping a multi-script font is not to ship a
> multi-script font. Since all the major FOSS font efforts turn multi-script
> at one time that means not shipping FOSS fonts.

> I wonder why that's not the right solution for me.

For those who haven't been in on this conversation when it has occurred
previously, the request is not:

 - Don't create stylistically coordinated fonts for many scripts

But rather:

 - Don't shove all scripts together into a single font file

Latin, Greek, Cyrillic work well together because they have reasonably
similar line-spacing requirements and design characteristics. A Latin
design can be translated one-to-one into Cyrillic design, and it will
work. 

But that isn't the case for Arabic, Devanagari, or Han. There are
definitely matching considerations when combining an Arabic font with a
Latin font.... some combinations will work better than others. But
forcing a fixed combination of Latin font and Arabic font on the user
and system integrator usually doesn't make sense.

Just like with line spacing, you can of course, make up technical
solutions. You could probably extend fontconfig to treat different
scripts of a font like they were different fonts. But these solutions
don't exist currently.
						Owen

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