Fontconfig - Nov 2005 - Setting preferred fonts that are not supported by the current locale

On Mon, 2004-07-05 at 12:23, Maarten van Gompel wrote:
> I have a bit of a problem I can''t seem to solve.. I want to set an
alias
> for Sans that prefers various fonts so the total will display most scripts
> nicely.
> 
> The problem I face now is that I can''t seem to get the system to
prefer
> fonts that don''t support my locale!
This is a known problem with the fontconfig matching algorithm;
fontconfig will sort *all* fonts matching the locale before 
all other fonts, but really once you''ve found *one* font for
Russian, you want to ignore the language tag.

In Pango, I''ve handled this reasonably well for many
cases by implementing "language tag refinement" - if Pango
finds a ''ru'' language tag on text that is in the Devanagari or
Arabic script it will recognize the mismatch and substitute
a more appropriate language tag (or ''xx'' when it
doesn''t
know anything better.)

In terms of workarounds for non-GTK+/non-Pango programs,
I don''t really have a good suggestion. You can configure
your aliases to ignore language tags altogether by using
strong bindings, but this will give you decidely inferior
results when language tags are present (for instance, on
Web pages)

Regards,
					Owen

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I have a bit of a problem I can''t seem to solve.. I want to set an
alias
for Sans that prefers various fonts so the total will display most scripts
nicely.

The problem I face now is that I can''t seem to get the system to prefer
fonts that don''t support my locale!

For example, I have the following set:

<alias>
        <family>sans-serif</family>
        <prefer>
                <family>DVBOTSurekh</family> 
                <family>shiDeva</family>
                <family>Raghindi</family>
                <family>Simplified Arabic</family>
                <family>FreeSans</family>
                <family>Arial Unicode MS</family>
                <family>Bitstream Cyberbit</family>
                <family>Code2000</family>
        </prefer>
</alias>

First there are some devanagari-only (hindi) fonts, then an arabic-only
font, etc... 

I have my locale set to russian, and because of that, I can''t seem to
get
the preferred fonts on top! I want those on top regardless of my locale,
because the idea is that the first fonts give me devanagari, the following
arabic and the rest is filled in later...

Is there any way to tell fontconfig to use my preferred fonts regardless
of the locale? Since I''m in a full-unicode environment I aim to display
all languages correctly, the locale is more or less irrelevant...

I have tried the following in an attempt to tell to all fonts that they
support russian (my locale) (making the whole thing locale independant) ,
but it didn''t work.. it seems the lang property is read-only?

<match target="font">
  <edit name="lang" mode="append_last">
    <string>ru</string>
  </edit>
</match>

I''ve run out of options and would appreciate if anybody could show me
the
way. This surely must be possible right?


-- 

Maarten van Gompel (Proycon)

proycon@anaproy.homeip.net
proycon@unilang.org

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