[Fontconfig] Webdings and other MS symbol fonts don't display

[Raimund Steger]

On 05/10/15 23:17, Ingo Brückl wrote:
>>> Behdad Esfahbod wrote on Fri, 24 Apr 2015 19:24:50 -0700:
>
>>>> On 15-04-24 06:05 AM, Ingo Brückl wrote:
>>>>> This is probably due to commit cbb6ee16 (Bug 35517 - Remove Apple Roman
>>>>> cmap support). Although commit d6d5adeb (Fix symbol cmap handling) stated
>>>>> to have fixed it, I cannot confirm. I can confirm, however, that version
>>>>> 2.8.0 works fine.
>>>>>
>>>>> So, is there any chance to make the MS symbol fonts (Webdings, Symbol,
>>>>> Wingdings) display with fontconfig again?
>
>>>> Please report your experience, with details. What do you expect with what
>>>> version, and what do you observe instead?
>
>>> I'd expect old MS documents opened by abiword's mswrite plugin to display
>>> the symbols in it rather than some alphanumeric characters.
>
>>> I'd further expect these symbols to show up in gucharmap (from U+0000) and
>>> in GTK's font selection dialog preview as well as in an editor like leafpad
>>> when selecting Webdings and typing something.
>
>>> Instead, I see normal latin characters.
>
>>> As mentioned, version 2.8.0 works as expected, 2.11.93 doesn't.
>
>> Ping?
>
> I provided the requested information, so could I get an answer please?

Ingo, I think going back to the Apple Roman cmap isn't really an option 
as that caused misbehavior in other fonts. Well, at least not by simply 
reverting cbb6ee1662f1219518677a9d489159778a812782.

I do agree that WingDings is at the moment (still) unusable with 
fontconfig because no document or app at the moment uses its PUA 
codepoints, and since Windows still supports the latin character mapping 
as per the OpenType recommendation cited, it's unlikely that this will 
change.

I would hope that a patch would be accepted despite the recent 
simplification efforts in fcfreetype.c. I know that this is a lame 
suggestion, but in the meantime the best you can probably do is to keep 
the affected apps linked against 2.8.0.

Raimund

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