On Wed, 2015-02-11 at 02:26 +0100, Raimund Steger wrote: > Adam Williamson wrote: > > It changes the width. The key thing about a fixed-width font > > is...it's fixed width. If someone's using one, they almost > > certainly don't want an artificial bold face that uses wider > > characters. This is a major pain when using a text editor that > > uses bold face for syntax highlighting, and affects two widely- > > used monospace fonts which have no native bold face, Droid > > Sans Mono and Inconsolata. > > > > Refs: > > > > http://askubuntu.com/questions/100672/how-to-prevent-automatic-bold-version-of-a-font-to-be-wider-than-regular-havin > > http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2012-January/003730.html > > https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=133256 > > --- > > conf.d/90-synthetic.conf | 4 ++++ > > I'm not sure if I like this, being an avid user of emboldened Lucida > Console myself. Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I understand that it's a bit questionable; the patch is by way of being a trial balloon to draw attention to the issue. > Still I see the problem if people don't want it, since it's at > position 90 and a target=font rule, meaning people cannot really > remove it in their user config. That's really somewhat unfortunate. > (Why > is that file even at that position?) Yeah, that's annoying. Even if you're in a position to add a rule to the systemwide config, I think you can't *entirely* override it, because the rule is basically destructive - once it's assigned weight 'bold', you can no longer do the same match! You can have a rule like this: <match target="font"> <!-- don't embolden fixed-width, as it changes the width --> <test name="spacing" compare="not_eq"> <const>mono</const> </test> <edit name="embolden" mode="assign"> <bool>false</bool> </edit> </match> But if I understand things correctly, that will *mostly* work, but things that 'us[e] Xft directly' (per the comment in 90- synthetic.conf) will still get bold. (I haven't checked this theory, though - in practice the above rule appears to be good enough for me). Editing 90-synthetic.conf directly is of course possible, but will get overwritten by vendor updates most likely. Honestly, though, I think poking fontconfig is a long way beyond a lot of folks :/ Even people who code aren't necessarily system config experts who grok how to poke their font rendering config, a lot of folks just expect that kind of thing to 'work out of the box' these days. This at least doesn't affect most distros by default I don't think because they tend to default to DejaVu Sans Mono which has a native width-matched bold variant, but Droid Sans Mono is certainly popular (Google results bear this out) and it does not have one. I found out that there actually *is* a width-matched bold variant of Inconsolata, but it's a whole messy forking situation (the original maintainer lost interest and there appear to be at least two active forks of the font now; I'm poking the relevant folks to try and get that all straightened out), and most distros don't include the bold one (or if they do, only as part of a TeX distribution, not as a system font). > On a side note, if you want same character widths for emboldened > fonts, you can typically use matrix elements. Like: > > <edit name="matrix" mode="assign"> > <times> > <name>matrix</name> > <matrix> > <double>.92</double><double>0</double> > <double>0</double><double>1</double> > </matrix> > </times> > </edit> > > (Above value is correct for emboldened Courier New; for Lucida > Console it's .96; YMMV) Seems like an awful lot of font-specific detail :/ I am really no font expert - so excuse me if this is a dumb question, but would it be at all plausible to implement some kind of generic non-widening synthetic bold in freetype which it could use for fixed-width fonts, presumably one that just tries to thicken the lines? If so I guess that'd be the least impactful way to approach the problem. I definitely don't have the knowledge for it, though. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net _______________________________________________ Fontconfig mailing list Fontconfig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/fontconfig
