Re: Chinese Traditional appearance -- mixed weights?

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

Hi Owen,

I've had this message of yours from last September in my inbox for quite
a while, because I couldn't congest it the first time.  Tonight I gave
it another try and I still don't follow.  Do you mind clarifying what
the fontconfig change is about?  More inline.

On Sat, 2006-09-30 at 11:55 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> The font selection algorithm for older versions of fontconfig is:
> 
>  1) Explicitly specified non-generic fonts, in the order specified
>    (generic fonts being things like "sans-serif", "serif", "monospace")
> 
>  2) Fonts from the generic in use matching the language tag of the text 
>    sorted by the order that those fonts appear in the generic.
>    The generic in use is determined in  priority order:
> 
>      - If one was given explicitly, that generic
>      - If a explicitly specified font is recognized as belong to
>        a generic class, that generic. (So, Arial pulls in sans-serif,
>        Courier, serif)
>      - Otherwise, sans-serif
>        
>  3) Other fonts matching the language tag, in random order.
> 
>  4) Other fonts from the generic in use.
> 
>  5) Other fonts in random order.

Ok, these make sense.  And the final list is pruned, right?


> If the language tag refinement scheme ended up with no language tag,
> then 2) and 3) are skipped... this is what is going on when your
> language is en-US.
> 
> The fix in the most recent versions of fontconfig referred to above
> is that 2) and 3) are replaced with:
> 
>  2') The best font that matches the language tag of the text chosen as
>      the first language-tag matching font of:
> 
>        - Fonts from the generic use, in the order specified 
>        - Other fonts in random order

I don't understand this one.

And which version of fontconfig was this introduced in?

> The advantage of that is that once we know what font we prefer for,
> say, Greek, a language tag of Greek won't then won't reorder Russian
> fonts to prefer fonts that also happen to cover Greek.

And I don't get this either.  So, you are saying that if we ask for
fonts with lang=Greek but look for fonts supporting Russian in the
result it will work as good as doing the same with lang=Russian?

> Sorry for the excessive level of detail here; I couldn't figure out
> a good place to stop and simplify. Though, trust me, there's still
> a fair a bit of complexity I *didn't* get to above. :-)
> 
>                                                 Owen 

Thanks,
-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
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