[Fontconfig] Finding a font but without fallback

[Sairus Patel]

 > I'd be *very* suspicious of any application 
that tried to disable the normal system font management

[ I'm assuming that by "the normal system font 
management" you mean FontConfig's fallback mechanism. ]

I believe I have good reasons to do so. I want my 
app to have its own fallback mechanism. This 
fallback mechanism will not just replace one font 
with another, as FontConfig seems to be doing, 
but do the fallback on a grapheme cluster 
granularity. (My app does its own layout, parsing 
GSUB and GPOS and other OT tables.) For this, I 
need to be able to tell whether a particular font 
is present on the system or not.

 > I'd say look up gucharmap's code

gucharmap doesn't seem to use FontConfig (I 
grepped for "Fc" and got no matches), but maybe 
it uses another facility e.g. Pango, which relies 
on FC. So it doesn't really answer my question 
about whether I can get FontConfig to tell me 
whether a particular font is present on the system or not.

Thanks for your response!

Sairus


At 4/25/2008 02:32 PM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>Le vendredi 25 avril 2008 à 13:34 -0700, Sairus Patel a écrit :
> > I haven't seen a response yet.
>
>As a user, and as someone interested in i18n, I'd be *very* suspicious
>of any application that tried to disable the normal system font
>management. I'd strongly suspect the application writer of wanting to
>disable a core platform feature just so he does not have to care about
>differences between this platform and other more limited ones, applying
>a lowest common denominator logic.
>
>Font & glyph substitution is *very* important on FLOSS systems,
>especially when you render documents composed on other platforms with
>different fonts (that have different unicode coverages)
>
>Nevertheless if you insist on producing something that does not fit with
>the rest of the system, I'd say look up gucharmap's code — it knowss what
>font each glyph is taken from, and once you have this info, refusing to
>use a particular glyph is not too far away.
>
>--
>Nicolas Mailhot
>