[Fontconfig] Installing fonts

[Keith Packard]

On Sat, 2007-04-07 at 00:58 +0100, Thomas Worthington wrote:
> Hi,
>    Simple question:
> 
> How do I install a font such as Frutiger so that styles like "black",  
> "ultra black", and "Extra Black Condensed" actually do something? Another  
> example would be installing Eurostile such that "Extended #2", "Extended  
> #2 Bold" etc. work.

An example of what fontconfig is generating and what you would like to
see would be helpful. While the binary format of the cache file is not
documented outside of the source code, the new capabilities of the
configuration system are reasonably well disclosed and include the
ability to manipulate the contents of the cache file as the fonts are
scanned.

I find the Frutiger fonts, in particular, to be quite badly named as
they are delivered. Frutiger LT 65 Bold is marked as belonging to the
Frutiger LT 45 Light family (as a Bold weight). Frutiger LT 55 Roman is
marked as belonging to the Frutiger LT 55 Roman family (as a Book
weight). These are the only two weights I have at present; I'd like to
know what weights the other variants are marked with.

However, I understand their predicament -- much software provides access
to only two weights (Roman and Bold), so they've taken this very
sophisticated family and crammed it into this UI.

> Although it is a simple question I would guess that I've put somewhere in  
> the region of 60 hours of work into finding or working out an answer over  
> the space of several years. I did have a solution in the days before the  
> binary font cache: I put the font files into the normal place, ran  
> fc-cache and then ran a Perl script over the resulting font.cache-1 files  
> which systematically fixed all the errors in them which prevented the  
> example fonts above and several dozen others working properly. With the  
> advent of the binary cache - apparently with no documented format - this  
> is no longer possible, and was never desirable anyway.

You can edit the results automatically using match/edit rules that
operate while the fonts are being scanned. Take a look at the
80-delicious.conf file for an example of fixing up incorrectly reported
fonts. If you have a generally useful suggestion on fixing Frutiger, we
could include that with an upcoming fontconfig release.

Are you actually finding it difficult to access these fonts in
applications by name? Or are you just hoping to make the names more
natural?

-- 
keith.packard at intel.com
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