[Pkg-fonts-devel] Defoma Hints

[Angus Lees]

On 6/23/06, Paul Wise <pabs3 at bonedaddy.net> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2006-06-23 at 00:08 +0200, Mohammed Adnène Trojette wrote:
> > one of the first things I wanted to know when I started packaging fonts
> > is how the hinting works in defoma. As I've adopted most of the font
> > packages I have, I did change most of the hints files.
>
> I used the utility in defoma to generate mine and then tweaked them
> where they were obviously wrong.


Unfortunately, the hints in defoma don't actually have any behaviour forced
on them and there is no 'lint' utility for checking them.  They are entirely
a set of free-form key-value pairs that accompany the font through the
defoma api and each application script does with them whatever it wants.

There are a set of 'expected' hints in the defoma-doc 'developers'
documentation, but realistically you will probably need to investigate
specific application scripts that aren't doing what you want and read their
README.Defoma and/or read the script source to see exactly what hints it is
working with.

> Does someone know any good documentation/tutorial link about this or
> > could sum up what is necessary to survive.
>
> Perhaps the defoma-hints manual page or the docs in the defoma-doc
> package would help?


They are definately the best starting point.  Feel free to ask here for
further help, I have been trying to scan this list every now and then
looking for defoma questions.

> To give a concrete example: in ttf-arabeyes, AlMohanad is the preferred
> > fonts for most applications. However, when I install the package, it
> > never gets used as default (in Firefox, e.g.). More than that, if I
> > install ttf-paktype, it is one of this package's fonts that gets chosen
> > instead of the Arabeyes' one.
>
> A while ago I had to read the source for defoma due to one of the
> stylish fonts in ttf-khmeros being selected over the others, and I
> concluded that the fontconfig support in defoma did not tell fontconfig
> about defoma priorities. The stylish font was being selected purely on
> the basis of filename.
>

fontconfig.defoma should be grouping the fonts by FontName and then picking
the highest priority, since FontName is the primary selector fontconfig
uses.

If your font is installed in /usr/share/fonts, its quite likely that the
font is available to fontconfig both directly from /usr/share/fonts/ and via
the priority-based symlink in /var/lib/defoma/fontconfig.d/, which means
conflict resolution is up to whatever algorithm fontconfig uses (first
found?).  Fixing this might be as simple as changing fontconfig's <dir>
ordering to prefer the defoma symlinks.

(.. presuming AlMohanad does in fact have a higher defoma priority than its
competitors of course.  If it doesn't and it really is the preferred font,
please increase its defoma priority hint)

-- 
- Gus

(I didn't write defoma, I just thought the featureset was desirable enough
that I didn't want to see the code die)
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