[Fontconfig] monospace support disabled?

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2003-03-28 at 11:24, Keith Packard wrote:
> Around 1 o'clock on Mar 28, Chris Cheney wrote:
> 
> > What fonts were having the problem which caused you to disable the support?
> 
> The problems worked in both directions -- there were many fonts which are
> useful in terminal emulators (like some versions of andale mono) which
> weren't marked as monospaced, making those not visible in KDE, and (worse, 
> it turns out), there were many Japanese fonts which were marked as 
> monospaced but which were not.  This latter issue caused significant 
> problems as Xft forced any font with the monospace attribute to be spaced 
> according to the maximum width of all glyphs in the font.
> 
> One easy possibility is to compute the spacing attribute directly from the 
> font; scan all of the glyphs and mark fonts as monospaced when they are in 
> fact monospaced.  I think that would be easy enough to try, and may fix 
> this particular problem well enough.
> 

Not sure if you are doing it or not, but CJK dual-width fonts need
to be treated as monospace, just not metric forced to the maximum
width. (If you want to metric force based on wcwidth() data, that 
would be OK, though a little tricky, but I'm not sure there is a
point.)

The reason for this is that these fonts are used in the contexts 
where monospace fonts are used - terminals and text editors.
Most terminal emulators and software that formats text for 
fixed width display properly understand double-char-cell characters
these days.

Regards,
                                         Owen