[Fontconfig] Ready for fontconfig 2.2?

Keith Packard fontconfig@fontconfig.org
Sat, 19 Apr 2003 21:00:58 -0700


Around 11 o'clock on Apr 20, James Su wrote:

> I just wonder, if these patches 
> http://www.kde.gr.jp/~akito/patch/fcpackage/2_1/ can be merged into
> fontconfig 2.2? These patches enhance the rendering of CJK fonts.

Those patches include several different changes, some of which are bugs 
and some of which introduce new functionality.  I've tried to extract the 
bug fixes from the rest and make sure they're in fontconfig at this point.

However, there are two useful pieces which aren't quite ready yet:

1)	Autodetection of 'dual-width' Asian fonts where the latin-1 
	characters and kana are half of the han widths.  Setting the
	spacing to 'mono' will break with public versions of Xft.
	I think these changes could be dramatically simplified to
	just look for fonts which have two distinct widths and set
	some configuration value (not spacing, alas, because of Xft)
	to 'dualwidth'.

2)	Using alternate languages in user interfaces.  This is a goal for 
	fontconfig sometime soon, but we need to work out the best way
	for this to be implemented.  In particular, the fonts.cache files
	must be user and locale independent; I've worked hard to make sure 
	that the information in those files does not depend on any particular
	user configuration.

	I think that means we should find a way to incorporate all of the 
	available names into the configuration, but I'm not quite sure
	how to do font matching among the multiple names.

	I suspect we'll need a brainstorming session on precisely how this
	should work.

3)	Some remapping for broken Japanese fonts?  This part seems useful,
	but I'd like to see a good description along with a limited patch
	posted to the fontconfig bugzilla so we can discuss it further.

Feel free to post any patches you like to the bugzilla, but try to keep 
each issue separate so we can look at the individually.

-keith