▶ Documentation for remapping-font-template.conf

This advanced template makes it possible to remap bad font metadata to correct

values at the fontconfig level. It is composed of four rules:

— the first one (the actual remapping block) detects fonts that declare

  [problemfontname],[problemfontstyle] and remaps them to

  [correctedfontname],[correctedfontstyle]. You can remap other attributes, use

  fc-query to see what a font file declares and fc-scan to check how you

  corrected it.

— the second one is similar to our substitution rule, and is used to alias

  [problemfontname] to [correctedfontstyle]. This is necessary to avoid

  breaking documents that reference the broken font naming hidden by the

  previous rule. (it does not take the style into account because

  unfortunately fontconfig can not handle it right now)

— the third one tells fontconfig it can use the font named [correctedfontname]

  when an application asks for the generic family [genericname].

— the fourth one tells fontconfig it can complete the font named

  [correctedfontname] with glyphs taken from fonts registered under

  [genericname].

If the problem font includes more than one style, you will have to repeat the

two first blocks for each [problemfontname],[problemfontstyle] couple needing

fixing. The two last rules are similar to what we do in all our other

patterns.

This kind of remapping is necessary because there were few conventions for font

naming for a long time, and some font creators put random garbage in there

(also some fonts were converted from older legacy formats while keeping

the metadata limitations of those formats, and some authors even released fonts

with plain typos in their metadata). Now that the two main companies behind the

OpenType spec, Adobe and Microsoft, specified strict conventions (to help

applications make sense of available fonts), all those font files need to be

fixed.

Such problems should always be reported upstream first.

Unfortunately, upstream can take a long time to act, and meanwhile the problem

metadata will appear in font lists and confuse applications. Since fixing font

files downstream is unpalatable when they are not released as fontforge SFD

files (otherwise, just patch the sfds and re-generate), using fontconfig to

hide the breakage is very convenient.

If you have different needs, take a look at the other templates.

Please replace [problemfontname], [problemfontstyle], [correctedfontname],

[correctedfontstyle], [genericname], with the

appropriate values in the following blocks of instructions.

A [correctedfontname] example would be:

DejaVu Sans

It's the name under which the font appears in GUI font drop-downs.

[correctedfontname] and [correctedfontstyle] values should aim to conform

strictly to the rules defined by Microsoft in its WWS fonts white-paper:

http://blogs.msdn.com/text/attachment/2249036.ashx

Adobe published an introduction to the WWS logic here:

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/typotechnica2007/Font%20names.pdf

Fontconfig generics ([genericname]) currently include:

— sans-serif

— serif

— monospace

— fantasy

– cursive

Processing the resulting file through xmllint with the "format" flag is usually

a good idea.

$ xmllint --format -o [XX]-[fontname].conf [yourfile]

The output file will be named:

[XX]-[fontname].conf

where [XX] should be a two-digit number corresponding to the font priority in

fontconfig.

© 2009 Nicolas Mailhot <nim at fedoraproject dot org>