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

[Owen Taylor]

On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 13:39, Keith Packard wrote:

> > 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.
> 
> If we place all of the names in the FC_FAMILY entry, then the existing
> listing code will work correctly as-is.  The only question is what values
> are returned by FcFontList.  I think it would be nice if it returned
> localized names  by default, but I can see arguments for having it always
> return names that can be represented in ASCII (or Latin-1).

I think FC_FAMILY should be restricted to being the ASCII-only name
as currently, and if you want a all-localized-font names, that should
be a separate property.

Users of fontconfig have to stay aware of the distinction between:

 - Programmatic name of font
 - Name of font displayed to the user

Or they won't behave properly when the user switches languages and
so forth.

Certainly, the two following need to stay true:

1) FcPatternGetString (pattern, FC_FAMILY, 0, &s) must return the
   programmatic name
 
2) Passing the programmatic name to FcFontSetList as FC_FAMILY
   must continue to match that font

But I think even adding the localized names to FC_FAMILY in some
way that preserves those two invariants is likely to cause 
breakage for existing programs.

Regards,
						Owen