Re: (re)display problems after font backend merge

[James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com>]

>>>>> "David" == David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net> writes:

David> The puzzle would be where the helvetica-like font that is
David> antialiased is coming from, then :-).

If you ask for the pattern «Helvetica» fontconfig will, using the
default fonts.conf, match that against a number of alternatives.

You need to use fc-match rather than fc-list to see this.

It is, in general, what the users want and expect.

The relevant comment is:

,----[ /etc/fonts/conf.d/30-metric-aliases.conf ]
| 	<!-- Alias similar/metric-compatible families from various sources:
| 
| 		PostScript fonts:
| 			Helvetica
| 			Times
| 			Courier
| 		URW fonts:
| 			Nimbus Sans L
| 			Nimbus Roman No9 L
| 			Nimbus Mono L
| 
| 		Microsoft fonts:
| 			Arial
| 			Times New Roman
| 			Courier New
| 		Liberation fonts:
| 			Liberation Sans
| 			Liberation Serif
| 			Liberation Mono
| 		StarOffice fonts:
| 			Albany
| 			Thorndale
| 			Cumberland
| 		AMT fonts:
| 			Albany AMT
| 			Thorndale AMT
| 			Cumberland AMT
| 
| 	     Of these, URW fonts are design compatible with PostScrict fonts,
| 	     and the Liberation, StarOffice, and AMT ones are compatible with
| 	     Microsoft fonts.
| 
| 	     We want for each of them to fallback to any of these
| 	     available, but in an order preferring similar designs
| 	     first.  We do this in three steps:
| 
| 		1) Alias each specific to it's generic family.
| 		   eg. Liberation Sans to Arial
| 
| 		2) Weak alias each generic to the other generic of its family.
| 		   eg. Arial to Helvetica
| 
| 		3) Alias each generic to its specifics.
| 		   eg. Arial to Liberation Sans, Albany, and Albany AMT
| 	-->
`----

-JimC
-- 
James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6