[Bug 18725] New: RFE: allow merging of legacy font family names

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18725

           Summary: RFE: allow merging of legacy font family names
           Product: fontconfig
           Version: 2.6
          Platform: Other
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: library
        AssignedTo: keithp at keithp.com
        ReportedBy: nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net
                CC: fedora-fonts-bugs-list at redhat.com


Historically font formats only allowed four faces regular, bold, italic, bold
italic. You had to use a separate font family to distribute condensed, heavy
etc variants

This has changed (cf http://blogs.msdn.com/text/attachment/2249036.ashx ) and
modern fonts such as DejaVu include all faces under a single family name.
Applications such as OO.o are being fixed to handle multifaced fonts

Unfortunately there are still many historic fonts in the wild distributed in
several sets of four faces (gs fonts, arial narrow, arial bold, etc). Those
fonts currently appear under different family names in fontconfig-using apps.
This is perturbing to users, since the same faces of historic and modern fonts
are not handled the same way. Microsoft did some sort of magic in uniscribe to
hide this distinction (irrelevant to users).

Please provide a documented config pattern for font distributors that enables
them to declare to fontconfig "font family A and font family B are the same,
please expose all the associated faces under A name to users".

(of course an application asking explicitely for B should still get it, but
users would only see A in font lists)


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