[Fontconfig] <alias> replace dejavu sans with Verdana

[Chris Jones]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 03:02:04PM EDT, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

> What's the thing with "preferred"?

I assume it adds flexibility, the possibility to switch off the family
conversion on the fly, depending on the value of the boolean, although I
don’t know how this could be done.

I say "I assume" because I found a thread in the list’s archives where
Keith Packard recommended this solution and I haven’t had the time to
look into it further.

Interestingly, just setting my desktop font to verdana 8pt. on a ubuntu
9.04 system, took care of having the hard-coded family=Arial,sans-serif
converted to verdana, out of the box, so to speak.

Since the ubuntu system is on the same hard drive as my "normal" debian
lenny, I was able to take a look at the setup in /etc/fonts/ on that
system, and I could not see anything really diffferent from that on
debian lenny. 

Because of this and other reasons, such as the fact that I don't see
ubuntu making changes to the system configuration because one particular
happens to favor verdana 8pt., and since there is nothing that looks
like a ~/.fontconfig file in my home directory, I suspect that gconf may
have something to do with it: the ubuntu system runs the gnome desktop,
while I am content to stick with a barebones Window Manager on "lenny".

But I will have to boot into that system to investigate further, which
is not convenient at this point. Obviously the first thing I'll do will
be to run an fc_match.

> What you want is something like:
> 
> <match target="pattern">
>           <test name="family">
>                   <string>sans-serif</string>
>           </test>
>           <edit name="family" mode="prepend_first" binding="strong">
>                   <string>Verdana</string>
>           </edit>
> </match>
> 
> Does that not work?

It should, and is probably quite sufficient for my needs :-)

Thank you for your comments.

CJ

PS. This is unrelated and OT to this list, but what would be a suitable
mailing list or newsgroup to ask questions about unicode fonts and how
to set up xterm for a pleasant unicode experience?