arial narrow is broken since Fedora 8

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Mar 9 décembre 2008 12:29, Julian Sikorski a écrit :
> IIRC in Fedora 8 timeframe it was decided
> to
> allow more font substyles than the 4 basic bold, italic, bold italic
> and normal

This was not decided in Fedora 8 this is how modern TrueType/OpenType
fonts work. Fonts have not been limited to 4 faces for a long time, we
at most decided to stop pretending it was the case.

(Here is a MS paper on the subject in case you still think it is a
Fedora-ism
http://blogs.msdn.com/text/archive/2007/04/23/wpf-font-selection-model.aspx
)

> All in all, all documents which were using arial
> narrow
> now refuse to render properly. Is there anything we could do to work
> around this issue? Some sort of quirk?

Workarounds are not sustainable given the problem is generic not
limited to this font and people working on workarounds do not spend
time working on the actual long-term fix.

Please make the necessary noise in upstream bug trackers to make them
fix their handling of modern fonts. You have at least some references
to existing open bugs here
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Known_fonts_and_text_bugs

Fixing font selection is the first item in
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/BetterFonts

I have no idea on the resources the Desktop Team intends to spend on
this whiteboard, or if it is even one of their priorities. But anyway,
fixing stuff QT or KDE-side should be done by QT or KDE people.

Best regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot