On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 19:38 -0400, Ambrose Li wrote: > > No. There is absolutely no way to fix this problem because this > is a design decision in fontconfig. > > In fact this annoying (and IMHO very serious) usability problem > had been brought up before (a very common problem with the free > Chinese fonts as well as random commercial fonts). I (and > IIRC some others) tried to convince people on this list that > fontconfig *must* provide a way to describe things like "the > bold font of font X is font Y". Unfortunately, it was thought > that this could be a "trademark problem". Ouch. The only way I could see it being a Trademark problem would be if fontconfig shipped with a configuration matching different font families together in this way, but I'm not a lawyer. I suppose I can modify the fonts themselves - but some fonts specifically prohibit this. LaTeX can do this just via virtual fonts. Elsner+Flake is a pretty big foundry, since they intentionally are packaging fonts this way - a lot of applications are going to be more difficult to use unless the application itself is able to figure it out. > > For CJK, this problem is so bad that bold and italic absolutely > do not work on fontconfig-based systems. (For English at least > many of the default fonts have bold and italic versions fontconfig > can recognize.) If you use an application or web site that uses > boldness or italicness to show you important information, you are > lost if you don't speak European languages. I personally only speak one language (I'd actually like to learn Korean at some point), but yes - that sounds like a very serious problem to me.
