[Fontconfig] how to enforce scalable fonts

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Welcome to the mess that is fontconfig! :)

:-) Honestly, FontConfig seems to work quite nice, but it lacks
someone who is taking care of, for example, by improving the
documentation or adding features.

>> 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?
>
> Well, it's not that clear cut.  For example, you may ask for Times
> New Roman, and fontconfig will give you Liberation Serif, or Nimbus
> Roman No9, or Tinos, and they are all real substitutes for Times New
> Roman.

Well, I consider FontConfig as *the* interface to the fonts of an
operating system, and there are situations where a substitution is
simply the wrong action.  I would prefer if there were functions which
returned an empty list in case the match isn't exact, say.

>>   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?
>
> Most probably because UTRG__12-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz has a limited
> charset, which in the minds of fontconfig is inadequate for your
> language of choice (en_US?).

Maybe.  However, then the documentation is not correct or imcomplete
since the result is simply surprising, and this is always a bad
sign...


    Werner