[Fontconfig] Two missing features

[Keith Packard]

Around 10 o'clock on Oct 15, Lars Knoll wrote:

> The biggest problem we encountered is that we have no way of knowing about 
> aliases defined in the fonts.conf files. Reason we need them is that we do 
> some font matching ourselves, and matching "serif" would always fail since we 
> didn't know this is a valid family name in font config.

There aren't 'aliases' per-se in fontconfig; fontconfig provides only a 
mechanism for modifying incoming patterns before matching.

An important reason for this is a trademark issue.  With the core fonts, we
had several font foundaries complain about the aliasing mechanism because
font lists would include trademarked font names not actually present on the
machine, a user selecting those trademarked names would see alternative
fonts presented on the screen.

However, there are standard substitution rules which guarantee to provide 
reasonable defaults for three of the CSS2 generic names (sans-serif, serif 
and monospace).  I suggest simply placing those generic names into all of 
your font menus, perhaps separate from the 'real' family names.

> The other missing feature are having access to the localized family names true 
> type offers. This is especially important for asian people. Also here I'd be 
> happy with an additional font property FC_LOCALE_FAMILY I can pass into 
> FcFontList to have the localized names included in the pattern.

Yes, I'd really like to offer this as well.  I've been thinking about how 
this might work and haven't really found the perfect solution.  What I can 
do is include all of the names in the FC_FAMILY/FC_STYLE entries and then 
provide an API that selects one using an RFC 3066 language tag.  The
existing listing API could then default to using the current locale.

If this makes sense, I'd like to give it a try and see if it actually 
works.

-keith