[Gllug] font annoyance of the day

[Peter Childs]

On 15/05/07, Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk> wrote:
>
> So I upgrade fontconfig and 80% of my fonts vanish from half my apps,
> including pretty much every X core font. Most importantly, jmk-neep has
> vanished from my XEmacs, leaving me with a wide choice of nasty fonts to
> write code in.
>
> But they haven't quite vanished. Rather, as `fc-match -v' makes clear,
> they no longer have `en' in their languages list, so many applications
> (especially including i18n-paranoid ones like XEmacs) consider that they
> shouldn't try to display English text in them. As far as I can tell the
> language list is only constructed at cache construction time, so it's
> time to try the `obvious' command
>
> FC_DEBUG=256 fc-cache -f -v
>
> which says, among thousands of lines of other crap, for every one of my
> vanished fonts,
>
> en(1) { 20ac }
>
> This is derived by calling FcCharSetSubtract() on the characters
> available in the font and the characters required to display the
> language.
>
> 20ac is EURO SIGN, and indeed in fontconfig-2.4.*/fc-lang/en.orth, we
> find, in part:
>
> 20AC # EURO SIGN
>
> So the fontconfig authors decided that most of my fonts are not suitable
> for English because... they don't have a euro sign in them. Remind me to
> not care. Since when is the UK in the Euro anyway?
>
> (Gotta love the ease-of-debugging, too. Magic numbers, completely
> obscure cause, weird commands required to derive trivial data, and a
> good bit of digging in the fontconfig source: welcome to the new Unix
> world. I'd have been utterly *stuck* if this wasn't free software.)
>
> Bah.
> --
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>

Hmm welcome to the world of fonts. (All fonts 12 point fonts are equal but
some 12 point fonts are more equal than others)

but see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_(typography)  for more details.

Basically sans serif 12 point is different from times 12 point and sanserif
in Openoffice 1 is different from sans serif in openoffice 2 which is
currently annoying me!

Peter.
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