[Fontconfig] how to enforce scalable fonts

[Werner LEMBERG]

[fontconfig 2.8.0]

>> I can try to circumvent the issue (this is, using FreeType stuff to
>> test whether a font is scalable), but then it would be necessary
>> that fontconfig returns a list of fonts which exactly fit the
>> search pattern so that I can iterate its elements (or perhaps
>> fontconfig itself provides such an iterator).  Is this possible?
>
> Check out FcFontSort().

Thanks.  If I interpret this function correctly, the application
itself has to decide how `near' the match is.  For example, doing

  fc-match -s utopia:regular

on my GNU/Linux box, the first few elements are

  UTRG____.pfa: "Utopia" "Regular"
  UTRG__12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz: "Utopia" "Regular"
  UTRG__12.pcf.gz: "Utopia" "Regular"
  DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
  DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Bold"
  DejaVuSans-Oblique.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Oblique"
  DejaVuSans-BoldOblique.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Bold Oblique"
  LiberationSans-Regular.ttf: "Liberation Sans" "Regular"
  arial.ttf: "Arial" "Normal"
  ...

so the application must actually test whether the font name is still
the one which is actually searched for.

It seems that FontConfig doesn't provide a function which only returns
the list of fonts which *exactly* match the pattern.  Any reason for
this?  Or am I missing something?

On the other hand, saying

  fc-match -s -a utopia:regular

starts with

  UTRG____.pfa: "Utopia" "Regular"
  putr.pfa: "Utopia" "Regular"
  UTB_____.pfa: "Utopia" "Bold"
  putb.pfa: "Utopia" "Bold"
  UTI_____.pfa: "Utopia" "Italic"
  putri.pfa: "Utopia" "Italic"
  UTBI____.pfa: "Utopia" "Bold Italic"
  putbi.pfa: "Utopia" "Bold Italic"
  UTRG__12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz: "Utopia" "Regular"
  UTRG__12.pcf.gz: "Utopia" "Regular"
  UTB___12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz: "Utopia" "Bold"
  UTB___12.pcf.gz: "Utopia" "Bold"
  ...

I wonder how this can be called `sorted'...  Why has putb.pfa (having
a different font series value) a higher priority than
UTRG__12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz?


    Werner