[Fontconfig] [PATCH] don't artificially embolden fixed-width fonts

Raimund Steger rs at mytum.de
Tue Feb 10 17:26:10 PST 2015


Adam Williamson wrote:
> It changes the width. The key thing about a fixed-width font
> is...it's fixed width. If someone's using one, they almost
> certainly don't want an artificial bold face that uses wider
> characters. This is a major pain when using a text editor that
> uses bold face for syntax highlighting, and affects two widely-
> used monospace fonts which have no native bold face, Droid
> Sans Mono and Inconsolata.
>
> Refs:
>
> http://askubuntu.com/questions/100672/how-to-prevent-automatic-bold-version-of-a-font-to-be-wider-than-regular-havin
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2012-January/003730.html
> https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=133256
> ---
>   conf.d/90-synthetic.conf | 4 ++++

I'm not sure if I like this, being an avid user of emboldened Lucida 
Console myself. Still I see the problem if people don't want it, since 
it's at position 90 and a target=font rule, meaning people cannot really 
remove it in their user config. That's really somewhat unfortunate. (Why 
is that file even at that position?)

On a side note, if you want same character widths for emboldened fonts, 
you can typically use matrix elements. Like:

   <edit name="matrix" mode="assign">
     <times>
       <name>matrix</name>
       <matrix>
         <double>.92</double><double>0</double>
         <double>0</double><double>1</double>
       </matrix>
     </times>
   </edit>

(Above value is correct for emboldened Courier New; for Lucida Console 
it's .96; YMMV)

Raimund

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