Re: improvement of font selection



On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 16:38 +0900, Kenichi Handa wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to suggest the attached patch to
> pango/pango-context.c.
> 
> Pango's shaper engine (struct _PangoEngineShapeClass) can
> have a callback function "covers", but it seems that it is
> not utilized that much.  In the function
> get_shaper_and_font_foreach(), the return value of
> (PangoCoverageLevel) _pango_engine_shape_covers() is simply
> checked against PANGO_COVERAGE_NONE, and if any other value
> is returned, that font is accepted.
> 
> I think it is better to try another font if
> PANGO_COVERAGE_FALLBACK or PANGO_COVERAGE_APPROXIMATE is
> returned here until PANGO_COVERAGE_EXACT is returned.
> 
> That way, pango can use a font most preferred by a shaper
> engine while falling back to APPROXIMATE or FALLBACK font.
> 
> What do you think?

When the shaper helps select the font there is a basic
problem ... I didn't think about it when I first created
the system, but discovered it later.

The problem is fontconfig ... since we ask fontconfig
to "trim" the results when calling FcFontSort(), only one
Japanese (say) font will be returned. If there is another
Japanese font further down the list, it won't be returned
unless it has new characters that the previous fonts don't
have.

So, I don't think your patch will work out reliably - 
the font with "APPROXIMATE" or "FALLBACK" coverage may
keep your "EXACT" font from being found at all.

On the other hand, if you don't trim the results you'll get
every single font in the system in the returned list, which
would be horrible for performance and memory usage.

The right thing to do is probably duplicate the trimming code
from fontconfig and combine it with our own logic ... if you
look at how trimming is implemented in fontconfig, it's not
doing anything that we could do ourselves as efficiently.

The other possibility - which could work Graphite and for 
OpenType, but maybe not as well for you - is to get fontconfig 
to sort the returned fonts based on what tables they contain,
and thus prefer the fonts with silf or GSUB/GPOS tables.

Regards,
					Owen

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