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

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2015-02-11 at 12:49 +0100, Raimund Steger wrote:
> forgot to add the list...
> 
> On Wed, February 11, 2015 02:37, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Wed, 2015-02-11 at 02:26 +0100, Raimund Steger wrote:
> > > Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > > [...]
> > 
> > >  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?)
> > 
> > Yeah, that's annoying. Even if you're in a position to add a rule 
> > to the systemwide config, I think you can't *entirely* override 
> > it, because the rule is basically destructive - once it's assigned 
> > weight 'bold', you can no longer do the same match! You can have a 
> > rule like this:
> 
> I suppose you could match on the 'embolden' flag then, knowing it 
> could only have been added by the earlier system config file, and 
> reverse that and the 'weight' property.

You don't know what the weight was set to before, though - only that 
it was "<= medium". But yeah, setting it back to medium is likely fine 
for 99% of cases.

> But you're probably right, your patch is probably the smoother 
> experience
> for most users, and people or distributions who still want 
> emboldened monospace can always add that in their config.
> 
> 
> > [...]
> > expert - so excuse me if this is a dumb question, but would it be 
> > at all plausible to implement some kind of generic non-widening 
> > synthetic bold in freetype which it could use for fixed-width 
> > fonts, presumably one that just tries to thicken the lines? If so I
> > guess that'd be the least impactful way to approach the problem. I 
> > definitely don't have the knowledge for it, though.
> 
> I haven't tried the Infinality patch you mentioned yet (or actually, 
> I don't remember, maybe I have, but in this case I paid no attention 
> to emboldened fonts) but it does sound interesting. I don't know 
> what the prospects of it being merged into upstream are though, so 
> maybe the change
> to 90-synthetic.conf is the easier route...

The infinality changes to freetype are extremely indigestible, 
unfortunately, at least to a non-expert; maybe to someone who works on 
this stuff all the time they're more obvious?

The current patch set appears to be 
http://www.infinality.net/fedora/linux/zips/freetype-infinality-2.4.12-20130514_01-x86_64.tar.bz2 , I have not tried it to see if it actually/still does non-widening 
synthetic bold, or even if it still applies at all.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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