Re: Font priorities

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 20:50, Stefan Baums wrote:
> Dear list,
> 
> another, related font priority problem: When running a GTK+ 2
> application (like gedit) under
> 
>    LC_CTYPE=zh_TW.UTF-8
> 
> GTK+/Pango/Fontconfig pick (from the looks of it) the font "AR PL
> KaitiM Big5" for the rendering of all Latin glyphs of "Sans."
> They do so regardless of what the setting of LANG and hence
> LC_MESSAGES is, and in my case it's en_US.UTF-8 (see other email
> for reasons why).  In any case, the resultant rendering is
> abysmally ugly due to the ill-designed Latin glyphs in the KaitiM
> font.  And anyway, one would expect GTK+/Pango/Fontconfig to use
> the same font for the rendering of a given Unicode range / script
> (here Latin script) regardless of what the locale settings are -
> and that font should be something like Helvetica or Arial.  (Keep
> in mind that the "font" that I am being told is used is called
> "Sans.")  I would be most interested in your suggestions for why
> this happens or how to fix it.

Why it happens:
 
 - The assumption is that if a font for your primary language (based
   on LC_TYPE, since that's the characters you want to display)
   has Roman characters, they will be better matched in size
   and appearance to the primary language's characters than
   some other font will be.

   fontconfig isn't designed around the sort of ugly fonts we
   often make do with on Linux, though it might be nice to be able
   to say "ignore the latin fonts in this font, they are worthless".

To fix it:

 - Simply pick a font you like better in the GNOME font property
   dialog, the fallback to the Arphic for Chinese characters
   will still work.

Regards,
                                     Owen