▶ Documentation for merging-font-template.conf

This advanced template makes it possible to merge several overlapping font
families and make them appear as one (the target font family) to applications.
It is composed of five rules:
— the first one changes the version of the target [fontname] family to an
  arbitrary high value (here 2).
– the second one remaps the name of the font family we want to merge with it
  ([mergedfontname]) to the target, and assigns it a lower number (here 1).
  Therefore fontconfig will always try to resolve a request using [fontname]
  files first, and only use [mergedfontname] files if [fontname] files are not
  sufficient.
— the third one is similar to our substitution rule, and is used to alias back
  [mergedfontname] to [fontname]. This is necessary to avoid breaking
  documents that reference [mergedfontname] since it is now hidden by the
  previous rule.
— the fourth one tells fontconfig it can use the font named [fontname] when an
  application asks for the generic family [genericname].
— the fifth one tells fontconfig it can complete the font named [fontname] with
  glyphs taken from fonts registered under [genericname].

It is possible to merge more than one family, you will only have to repeat the
second and third rules as many times as necessary. Be careful however to
strictly order the font versions to make sure fontconfig uses the right
priorities within the target font family.

The typical use-case are font families released as several font sets, one of
which being of good quality but of limited Unicode coverage, and the others
providing wider coverage at the expense of quality or variety of styles.
Famous examples are “Arial” vs “Arial Unicode”, “Droid Sans” vs “Droid Sans
Fallback” or “Droid Sans Japanese”. Another use-case are fonts in legacy
formats: because those formats limited greatly the number of glyphs that could
be put in a single file, it was common to split a logical font family in
several encoding-specific files (of course in that case it would be better if
someone just merged the files in a single OpenType font).

If you have different needs, take a look at the other templates. For example
changing the naming of a font without merging it with another is better done
using the remapping template.

Please replace [fontname], [mergedfontname], [genericname], with the
appropriate values in the following blocks of instructions.

A [fontname] example would be:
DejaVu Sans
It's the name under which the font appears in GUI font drop-downs.

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>