Fontconfig - Nov 2005 - Early results with multi lingual fontconfig names

I''ve gone ahead and added support for multiple family and style names
to
fontconfig.  The results are encouraging.  Here''s a selection of family
names for fonts which provide multiple families.  Note that the
''familylang''
property is supposd to parallel the family property, and it generally does.

<evo fonts> fc-list : family familylang | grep ,
AR PL Mingti2L Big5,????????:familylang=en,zh-tw
Baekmuk Dotum,?? ??:familylang=en,ko
DFSongStd,??????:familylang=en,zh-tw
Graphite Light ATT,Graphite Light CE ATT:familylang=en,pl
Graphite Light Narrow ATT,Graphite Light Narrow CE ATT:familylang=en,pl
GulimChe,???:familylang=en,ko
Kochi Mincho,????:familylang=xx,ja
SimSun,??:familylang=en,zh-cn
?? ????,MS Gothic:familylang=xx,en
MingLiU_HKSCS,???_HKSCS:familylang=en,zh-tw
Dotum,??:familylang=en,ko
NSimSun,???:familylang=en,zh-cn
Baekmuk Batang,?? ??:familylang=en,ko
Kochi Gothic,??????:familylang=xx,ja
AR Mingti Light B5,????:familylang=en,zh-tw
Baekmuk Headline,?? ????:familylang=en,ko
DotumChe,???:familylang=en,ko
AR PL KaitiM Big5,??????:familylang=en,zh-tw
extended\-watanabe\-mincho,??Watanabe??,b?5:familylang=en,ja,ja
Gulim,??:familylang=en,ko
AR PL KaitiM GB,???????:familylang=en,zh-cn
Baekmuk Gulim,?? ??:familylang=en,ko
UnBatang,? ??:familylang=xx,ko
AR PL SungtiL GB,???????:familylang=en,zh-cn

(Interesting that Graphite appears to include Polish names; fontforge, at
least agrees with fontconfig)

And, as discussed, I found all of the MS fonts had *many* representations
for styles:

<evo fc-list> fc-list : family familylang style stylelang | grep
''style=.*,''
...
Courier New:style=Bold Italic,Negreta cursiva,tu?n? kurz?va,fed kursiv,Fett
Kursiv,?????? ??????,Negrita Cursiva,Lihavoitu Kursivoi,Gras Italique,F?lk?v?r
d?lt,Grassetto Corsivo,Vet Cursief,Halvfet Kursiv,Pogrubiona kursywa,Negrito
It?lico,?????????? ??????,Tu?n? kurz?va,Fet Kursiv,Kal?n ?talik,Krepko
po?evno,Lodi
etzana:stylelang=xx,ca,cs,da,de,el,es,fi,fr,hu,it,nl,no,pl,pt,ru,sk,sv,tr,sl,eu
Haettenschweiler:familylang=en:style=Regular,normal,Standard,Normaali,Normale,Standaard:stylelang=en,da,de,fi,it,nl
Trebuchet
MS:familylang=en:style=Italic,Cursiva,kurz?va,kursiv,??????,Kursivoitu,Italique,D?lt,Corsivo,Cursief,Kursywa,It?lico,??????,Po?evno,?talik,Etzana:stylelang=en,ca,cs,da,el,fi,fr,hu,it,nl,pl,pt,ru,sk,tr,eu
...

What I haven''t done yet is produce a convenience API for looking
through
this data to select an entry for presentation to the user.  I''d like a
bit
of help figuring out how that should work.  As we discussed, there are
really three values one can present:

 1)	The English name (best for UIs which can''t handle ?real? text).

 2)	The ?natural? name---the one which matches the intended language
 	of the font best. Given my experiences today, I suspect this
	is probably equal to ''the first non-english name'', but that
	could well be wrong for some fonts.

 3)	The locale name---the one which matches the current locale
 	(or application provided ''lang'' value) best.

Would people like two or three separate APIs?  Can we capture this
information in a single API without too much confusion?

Thanks to everyone for helping push multi lingual names in a reasonable
direction; let''s finish up the API and see how well it works in
practice.

-keith


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