Re: Chinese Traditional appearance -- mixed weights?

[Greg Aumann <Greg_Aumann sil org>]

Owen Taylor wrote:
> Do you think that Pango should do frequency analysis of incoming text
> to guess the particular Han-using language it is in (allowing for the
> possibility of multiple Han-using languages in a single Paragraph, 
> also allowing for paragraphs that are too short to do any such
> analysis)?
> 
of course not. As you obviously expect.

> If not, then you have two possibilities:
>
> A) Provide Pango with the information about the language you are
>    displaying (via the locale environment variables, or via markup...

I tried setting the locale to different values to see what the effect
would be. If I use zh_CN.UTF-8 then it uses the same Chinese font for
all the text regardless of being mono, sans or serif. I don't get the
mixing of two fonts. If I use zh_TW.UTF-8 I get mixing of the same two
fonts as the English locale but I get a lot more of the "italic" looking
one and much less of the "sans serif" looking one. A Japanese locale
gives me the same results as an English one. So obviously setting the
language makes a difference. That was something that I didn't realise.
But setting the language to a Han locale doesn't necessarily solve the
mixing fonts problem. In fact if I use a Taiwanese locale the text is
more simplified characters than if I use an English locale!

How does pango determine which fonts to use for different languages? I
can't see anything language specific in fonts.conf.

Also how can I untangle the effects of the font sets? I want to figure
out which glyphs are coming from which fonts so I can adjust fonts.conf
properly i.e. also understand what is going on. When I change the font
in gedit or gcharmap to a specific one it still is bringing in glyphs
from other fonts. Is going through all my font files in fontforge and
comparing appearances the only way?