Keith Packard wrote:
On Thu, 2006-06-29 at 10:43 -0700, Jay Hobson wrote:
Keith,
While I can see the need for a ban on unicode codepoint sets, I think
many end users will find that horribly difficult to use and set up. With
the patch that I am providing, you can accomplish the same basic goal
without nearly as much hardship. I suspect it is easier to look up what
languages a font supports, than what the unicode codepoint set is.
That's a good point. Having the ability to *also* edit the language set
offered by a font makes good sense.
I think what I was focused on was the notion that we should (finally)
look at editing the data about the available fonts instead of trying to
work around broken data during the match phase.
Additionally, if you ban an entire language from a font, then the
language will be displayed with a different font and have a better
chance of looking consistent. If you ban a codepoint set, unless you get
the entire language coverage, you run the risk of having two fonts
display your text, which would likely look bad.
Right. Let's work on a font pattern editing mechanism and then do both
code point and language editing. That should fix both problems nicely.
The main reason for a code point ban is to elide latin glyphs from
non-latin fonts -- TrueType nearly insists that all fonts include latin
glyphs, which makes no sense for many non-latin fonts, and which often
results in really ugly latin glyphs being included.
One interesting twist to this, and the reason that I designed the patch
the way that I did, is that some of these same fonts that include Latin
glyphs can have latin characters that are matched nicely to the other
languages contained in the font (not often). IE: size, thickness, etc.
However, the latin only contains either Serif or Sans-Serif glyphs, and
the other language is often needed for both Sans and Serif coverage.
This leaves a latin that might be nice to have in one instance, and not
in the other. Hence the reason that you would want to dynamically enable
and disable languages from a font. For one alias it would be good, for
the other, it would be bad. Right now, there is no mechanism for
detailing language coverage by alias. The patch includes such a
mechanism which adds some additional value to fontconfig.
The language ban will work better where multiple languages share the
same code point range.
Good ideas; let's see what we can manage.
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