[Fontconfig] Revisiting FcFontMatch and FcFontSort

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 1:00 AM Werner LEMBERG <wl at gnu.org> wrote:

>
>
> Can you give an example?


We were talking about examples like combining a base glyph with a
rare mark. If the mark is missing in the font, you have different options
what to do - look for a precomposed glyph, find a suitable variant of the
mark, or go for all fallback font. Maybe Behdad has concrete examples.

Again, please give an example.  It seems to me that you are actually
> thinking of improving Pango, not fontconfig per se.  I only wonder
> whether the approach you are envisioning has drawbacks to applications
> that are not using Pango.
>

Sure, this is about improving font rendering. The high-level parts of it are
implemented in Pango. But it needs suitable font enumeration apis, which
is where fontconfig comes in.

I don't object to using harfbuzz – this is what FreeType is actually
> using for getting glyph coverage for its auto-hinter.  However,
> harfbuzz has some quite massive dependencies that might not be wanted
> by the user.
>

Great, this might be a more or less solved problem , then.

>From the Pango perspective, a harfbuzz dependency is not such a big
deal - we use harfbuzz anyway. And using harfbuzz directly, instead of
via freetype, might have other advantages for fontconfig.

Matthias
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/attachments/20210223/6f822fa9/attachment.htm>