[Pkg-fonts-devel] Dejavu font behvior in OO.org is different than in other programs

[Denis Jacquerye]

On 7/21/07, Lior Kaplan <kaplan at debian.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Could you take a look at bug #427996 ?
>
> Maybe you'll have any idea, why does our users get different font
> variants in each program (oo.org, gedit, kde font isntaller).
>
> Thanks.

This has been reported in bug 426125 (and 415432), which is mislabeled
as a ttf-dejavu bug.
The bug is due to qt3 and openoffice not handling OpenType font names
as defined in the specifications.
An OpenType font family can have numerous style variants. This is very
common in large families from foundries such as Adobe.

There are legacy family and style names. These are limited to 4
variants (Regular, Bold, Italics, Bold Italics or synonyms). Some
fonts, like Nimbus or Lucida, use only 4 variants but the names do not
match these four and are sometimes renamed.
Qt3, inkscape and OpenOffice are limited to legacy names.
See http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=79878
http://trolltech.com/developer/task-tracker/index_html?id=143304&method=entry
and https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=604306&aid=1448618&group_id=93438
for Inkscape

There are preferred family and style names. These are (a bit too)
flexible with a single family name and any possible style name. DejaVu
fonts currently have both preferred and legacy names as defined in the
OT specifications.
Recent versions of fontconfig will use both preferred and legacy names
(as opposed to just legacy names before) and prioritize preferred
names.
Currently, gkt+ and pango with fontconfig work best with large font
families, although a couple of weight variants might be might be
mishandled. See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166709

The next revision of the OT specs will add another set of font family
and style names. These will be limited to width, strecth and style
variants. So large font families are flexible but within a reasonable
style variation.
This is not yet supported.

Cheers,

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye