[Fontconfig] Installing fonts

[Thomas Worthington]

On Sat, 07 Apr 2007 02:56:14 +0100, Keith Packard <keithp at keithp.com>  
wrote:

> 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.

Eurostile appears to be the biggest problem. There is Eurostile and  
Eurostile Extended. From fc-list|sort I get:

Eurostile:style=Bold
Eurostile:style=Bold Condensed
Eurostile:style=Bold Extended #2
Eurostile:style=Bold Oblique
Eurostile:style=Condensed
Eurostile:style=Demi
Eurostile:style=Demi Oblique
Eurostile:style=Extended #2
Eurostile:style=Medium
Eurostile:style=Oblique

But from

fc-match "Eurostile"

I get

EUEX____.PFB: "Eurostile" "Extended #2"

when I expect

EU______.PFB: "Eurostile"

likewise,

fc-match "Eurostile-12:Demi"

also gives the result:

EUEX____.PFB: "Eurostile" "Extended #2"

Note that "Demi" is listed on fc-list as one of the available styles.

I get similar results from Helvetica where fc-match "Helvetica" and  
fc-match "Helvetica:Bold" give the expected results:

hv______.pfb: "Helvetica" "Regular"

and

hvb_____.pfb: "Helvetica" "Bold"

but fc-match "Helvetica:Narrow" gives the Regular style and filename again:

hv______.pfb: "Helvetica" "Regular"


> 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?
>

The answer to that is quite complex but it might be easier to simply  
explain what I used to do with the human-readable cache files. For fonts  
where fontconfig was giving strange answers I replaced the cache data in  
such a way that "Helvetica Narrow" appeared as a totally separate font  
with only the one style ("regular), unrelated in anyway to any other font  
called "Helvetica"; I did the same for all fonts with styles not in the  
list

italic
bold
oblique
roman
regular
medium
normal

As it seemed to be styles not on this list which were most often  
troublesome.

The result was a long, somewhat unorganised list of fonts, to be sure, but  
far more importantly, I could access any font in any style I had installed  
in any program I had. The other good thing about this was that I did not  
have to do anything in particular for any style not on this list; they  
were all treated the same. If I had a font called "swinging60s" in styles  
"groovy", "cool," and "hip" it made no difference to me, they would just  
appear as three separate fonts which I could use without creating any  
special matching rules. This is an important point on a system with over  
100 fonts on it.

The idea of using such rules seems far outside the desired functionality  
for a modern font system. I can cope with one or two special cases, but to  
ask a designer trying out Inkscape or any othe program to edit XML files,  
and then to *take those files with them* to every new machine ever  
afterwards is madness!

The installation of a font should ideally consist of putting the font  
file(s) into a directory called "Fonts" period. The real world and the  
many arbitary and strange names that exist and will continue to exist  
surely makes any attempt to use matching rules ultimately futile and  
unwieldy. Certainly, given the choice of accessing fonts in a crude way  
and not being able to access them at all without editing XML files, I  
think the vast majority of designers would take the former, as would I.

Thomas Worthington