[Fontconfig] Disabling font X for language Y

[Peter Linnell]

On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 20:36, Stefan Baums wrote:
> > It probably is. Qt 3, can synthesize a missing font on the fly.
> 
> That is actually another problem of QT that I wasn’t planning to
> go into here and now, but since you bring it up...  Apparently, QT
> can substitute whole scripts that are missing in font X from font
> Y, but not individual characters.  Have a look at the attached
> screenshot of one of my directories in Konqueror.  The words with
> the empty boxes are “brāhmī” and “замѣтка”.  The font used for the
> former (Bitstream Vera Sans) has some coverage of the Latin
> script, but is lacking glyphs for the two characters ā and ī, and
> QT seems incapable of recognising this and getting those glyphs
> from another font.  Similarly, the font used for “замѣтка” (the
> ugly Chinese one) has some coverage of Cyrillic, but does not
> include a glyph for the character ѣ, which QT fails to supply from
> another font.
> 
> So the overall impression is that QT 3 uses Fontconfig
> superficially and incorrectly.  This probably has to be fixed at
> the QT end, but in the meantime I would like to configure
> Fontconfig so I can sidestep QT’s most egregious mistakes.
> 
> > You can adjust Qt font settings in qtconfig, which may or may
> > not be installed with with Debian's packaging.
> 
> It is in the package qt3-qtconfig, but all it allows you to do is
> to substitute one whole font for another.  But I don’t want to
> replace the whole of the Chinese fonts with some other fonts, just
> the Cyrillic part of them.  Also, even after I did specify in
> qtconfig a substitution of “Free Helvetian” for both “AR PL KaitiM
> GB” and “AR SungtiL GB”, that didn't have the slightest effect
> when typing Cyrillic in kedit - it still uses the Cyrillic glyphs
> from the Chinese font.
> 
> Stefan

Next question: Which version of Qt ?

IIRC 3.3.1 has fixes for fontconfig. See doc.trolltech.com for detailed
changes.

We are investigating Indic script support for Scribus and 3.3 now can
optionally support Tamil, but the application needs to have the correct
headers inlcuded to support it.

Hope that helps,

Peter