[Fontconfig] alternate names [was: Two missing features]

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

KP> Yes, FcFontList returns patterns holding all of the information from the 
KP> fonts, so it will have all of the names.  One issue is that you will get 
KP> multiple entries if fonts have different sets of family names.

I suggest a new property of FcFonts that holds an a-list of all the
alternate names.  Naive applications will only get the primary name;
wiser applications will get all the names.

We also need an API to get a font by another name; scanning all fonts
and building a database of all alternate names is of course
prohibitive.  I suggest having two variants of the font listing
interface, one that only considers primary names, one that uses all of
the names.

(OT: is there any way the application can find out whether the font
database has changed since a given date?  That would be useful for
applications wishing to cache font-related information.)

>> I'd guess that most fonts have at most two family names. An
>> international and a localized one.

I think we really want to have a generic notion of ``alternate name''
that is not limited to localisation.  The issue has come up already
when we were trying to do all fonts localisation (including core
fonts) through fontconfig; you want fontconfig to provide you with the
XLFD name when it cannot be easily derived from the fonts real name.
I have no doubt that people will come up with other strange needs.

                                        Juliusz