[Fontconfig] Font matching in Unicode locales

[Ambrose Li]

Hi,

sorry that my question was poorly worded (and thus perceived as
a "trick question").

Firstly, from the viewpoint of a (traditional) Chinese speaker,
"supporting Big5" is indistinguishable from "supporting
traditional Chinese" (part of the reason being, strictly
speaking, "Big5" *not* supporting traditional Chinese [at least
a small but significant number of characters used in real-life
situations] anyway -- i.e., we are used to our own de facto
standard encoding not supporting our own language for perhaps
15 years). I'd say that ordinary end users (i.e., people who
do not know what an encoding is) are even more likely to not
distinguish between the two.

And not all traditional Chinese fonts support the bulk of
Big5; decorative fonts may support only the "frequently used
characters", i.e., the first 5401/13051 = 41% of the original
Big5 space, a lot of these aren't even Han characters; I believe
this would make fontconfig conclude that such fonts do not
support Chinese. I reason that if this is the case it would not
make sense for the end user (since if he/she posess such a font,
he/she would likely to be a graphic designer and knows what
he/she is doing.) (Is this valid, or am I mistaken? Perhaps I'm
mistaken. Or perhaps I'm too old fashioned and perhaps we don't
find such fonts very often any more.)

This is probably ultimately more philosophical than practical,
unless an app plainly refuses to work with a font when
fontconfig tells it that a language is not supported. Mozilla
used to be such an app, but it seems to have somewhat improved
in this regard.



-- 
Ambrose LI Cheuk-Wing  <a.c.li at ieee.org>

http://ada.dhs.org/~acli/