[Fontconfig] family_name for the font without ASCII names

suzuki toshiya mpsuzuki at hiroshima-u.ac.jp
Thu Jan 6 21:45:30 PST 2011


Hi,

Recently I found a group of Japanese fonts that requires
hinting even for ASCII characters, for readable results:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2010-12/msg00021.html

During the registration of them to tricky font lists,
I found that these fonts lack ASCII family name. Their
name tables are for MacJapanese (ShiftJIS) and Microsoft
Unicode. In both names, the family names are in Japanese,
not English.
In such case, current FreeType2 replaces non-ASCII
character in non-ASCII family name by "?". Thus,
FT_Face->family_name is set by broken string. There
is a possibility that the different fonts will have
same broken family name. However, the PostScript name of
the fonts I found are still in ASCII.

I think, a few improvements would be possible.

A) If we cannot find ASCII family name from WWS family name,
   preferred family name and (original) family name, try to
   find ASCII name in PostScript name.

B) Non-ASCII characters should not be replaced by "?",
   but escaped, like "\OOO" or "\xXX" or "U+XXXX".

# Using both is possible.

Such changes will invalidate the fontconfig database,
so I want to ask the comment from fontconfig developers/users.

Regards,
mpsuzuki


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