Bug#354537: Errors with font-matching in 'rich' font families

[Ralf Stubner]

reassign 354537 fontconfig
thanks

Dear fontconfig maintainer,

in bug #354537 it has been noted, that in some applicatins the
LMTypewriter10 font from the lmodern package appears with so called
small caps, ie, the lower case letters look like down scaled capital
letters. After my today's experiments, this seems to be a more general
problem in fontconfig when working with font families that contain more
than the four standard variants Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold-Italic.

I am working on a sarge system, ie fontconfig version 2.3.1-2, with the
lmodern package from backports.org, version 0.99.3-1bpo1. Similar
problems have been reported with unstable systems, but I don't have one
for testing right now. 

Let's look at LMTypewriter10:

~$ fc-list LMTypewriter10
LMTypewriter10:style=CapsOblique
LMTypewriter10:style=DarkOblique
LMTypewriter10:style=Italic
LMTypewriter10:style=LightCondensed
LMTypewriter10:style=Dark
LMTypewriter10:style=CapsRegular
LMTypewriter10:style=Oblique
LMTypewriter10:style=LightOblique
LMTypewriter10:style=Regular
LMTypewriter10:style=LightCondensedOblique
LMTypewriter10:style=Light
~$ fc-match  LMTypewriter10              
lmtcsc10.pfb: "LMTypewriter10" "CapsRegular"
~$ fc-match  LMTypewriter10:Regular
lmtcsc10.pfb: "LMTypewriter10" "CapsRegular"
~$ fc-match  LMTypewriter10:CapsRegular
lmtcsc10.pfb: "LMTypewriter10" "CapsRegular"

The default font when no further information is supplied or when one is
looking for Regular should be lmtt10.pfb which has style=Regular. But
only when one explicitly searches for this, one does find the font:

~$ fc-match  LMTypewriter10:style=Regular
lmtt10.pfb: "LMTypewriter10" "Regular"

Another interesting case is the following

~$ fc-match  LMTypewriter10:CapsOblique
lmtcsc10.pfb: "LMTypewriter10" "CapsRegular"
~$ fc-match  LMTypewriter10:style=CapsOblique
lmtcso10.pfb: "LMTypewriter10" "CapsOblique"

So even though there is an exact match for CapsOblique, it is not found
when searching without the explicit 'style='.

Similar oddities happen with LMRoman10 from the same package:

~$ fc-list LMRoman10
LMRoman10:style=CapsRegular
LMRoman10:style=CapsOblique
LMRoman10:style=DemiOblique
LMRoman10:style=Regular
LMRoman10:style=BoldOblique
LMRoman10:style=Demi
LMRoman10:style=Italic
LMRoman10:style=Oblique
LMRoman10:style=Bold
LMRoman10:style=BoldItalic
~$ fc-match LMRoman10:Oblique
lmcsco10.pfb: "LMRoman10" "CapsOblique"
~$ fc-match LMRoman10:style=oblique        
lmro10.pfb: "LMRoman10" "Oblique"


I don't know if these problems are related to those I have with other
font families that come in many shapes. For example Zurich (a Univers
clone from Bitstream that can be found on old CorelDraw CDs) comes in a
total of 22 variants. The condensed variants are correctly idenitfied,
but the extended not:

~$ fc-list Zurich:width=100 family style                       
Zurich:style=Black Italic
Zurich:style=Light Italic
Zurich:style=Black Extended
Zurich:style=Black
Zurich:style=Extra Black
Zurich:style=Bold Extended
Zurich:style=Italic
Zurich:style=Extended
Zurich:style=Bold
Zurich:style=Light
Zurich:style=Regular
Zurich:style=Ultra Black Extended
Zurich:style=Bold Italic
~$ fc-match zurich:bold
bunb8a.pfb: "Zurich" "Bold"
~$ fc-match zurich:black
bunc8ax.pfb: "Zurich" "Black Extended"

This makes working with these fonts in applications such as abiword or
OOo almost impossible. Although these applications seem to have even
more problems that fc-match. For example, selecting in abiword Zurich in
the four standard variants Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold-Italic, I end
up with

ZurichBT-RomanCondensed     
ZurichBT-LightItalic        
ZurichBT-BoldExtended       
ZurichBT-BoldItalic         

in the PS file. I don't know what else is going wrong here, since
fc-match gets these cases correct:

~$ fc-match zurich:italic
bunri8a.pfb: "Zurich" "Italic"
~$ fc-match zurich       
bunr8a.pfb: "Zurich" "Regular"
~$ fc-match zurich:bold:italic
bunbi8a.pfb: "Zurich" "Bold Italic"
~$ fc-match zurich:bold       
bunb8a.pfb: "Zurich" "Bold"

cheerio
ralf