Nicolas, all that talk makes sense, but unless a concrete proposal for how to change fontconfig comes in, I don't know what to do about it. behdad On 11/26/2009 04:35 AM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > > > Le Mer 25 novembre 2009 23:54, Behdad Esfahbod a écrit : >> >> On 11/25/2009 07:01 AM, Paul Flo Williams wrote: > >>> 2. The fonts.conf page says that 'fonts often include "broken" glyphs which >>> appear in the encoding but are drawn as blanks on the screen.' A trawl >>> of >>> the mailing list suggests that this configuration option is ancient -- >>> at >>> least I can't find any discussion of its introduction -- so is this form >>> of breakage common in fonts we use today? >> >> Donno. > > I don't know if it's common, but it definitely exists today. We've seen it > just a few months ago in Fedora (in smc fonts IIRC). In their case it was not > even a blank but a buggy glyph meant to indicate 'reserved' > > IMHO now there are efforts in big apps such as Firefox to do more CSS3, > including the CSS3 "select unicode subrange in font" operator, it is becoming > even more urgent for fontconfig to stop considering a font is a basic atomic > unit, and allow fontconfig users to write rules that only apply to part of a > font. It is a huge problem if the font selection model used by fontconfig does > not permit direct mapping from the font selection model used by web-oriented > apps (which can be basically any app now more and more GUI toolkits move to > use of CSS to specify styling) > > http://people.mozilla.org/~jdaggett/AdvancingWebTypography.pdf page 42 > > The "fonts should only include one script with consistent quality so > fontconfig does not need to split them" is a lost cause now, the font > community chose, and not the way fontconfig authors wished. > > All the conflicts between scripts and weird inverted logic overrides almost no > one really understands are caused by the "font is an atomic fontconfig unit" > postulate. All past attempts to mitigate those problems without changing the > "font is an atomic fontconfig unit" postulate have failed miserably. Humans > just do not think fonts are an atomic unit, and can not wrap their minds > around a system where they are forced to think this way. > _______________________________________________ Fontconfig mailing list Fontconfig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/fontconfig
