[Bug 706559] New: Font variants not used correctly

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Summary: Font variants not used correctly

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=706559

           Summary: Font variants not used correctly
           Product: Fedora
           Version: 15
          Platform: Unspecified
        OS/Version: Unspecified
            Status: NEW
          Severity: unspecified
          Priority: unspecified
         Component: fontconfig
        AssignedTo: behdad(a)fedoraproject.org
        ReportedBy: dwmw2(a)infradead.org
         QAContact: extras-qa(a)fedoraproject.org
                CC: behdad(a)fedoraproject.org, pnemade(a)redhat.com,
                    fonts-bugs(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
    Classification: Fedora
      Story Points: ---


I have installed some company-provided fonts for use in presentations etc.:

 $ ls /usr/share/fonts/neo-sans-intel/
NeoSansIntel-Italic.ttf       NeoSansIntel-MediumItalic.ttf
NeoSansIntel-LightItalic.ttf  NeoSansIntel-Medium.ttf
NeoSansIntel-Light.ttf        NeoSansIntel.ttf

In LibreOffice I have a choice of three separate fonts: Neo Sans Intel, Neo
Sans Intel Medium, and Neo Sans Intel Light.

For each of those three, the italic version of the font (from the separate TTF
file) is used. I can tell by the tail on the 'f' character. For bold text,
however, an 'emboldening' algorithm seems to be used instead of using the
appropriate separate font file.

In GNOME font selection dialogs, I see just one 'Neo Sans Intel' family, with a
choice of 8 styles. I'll ignore the italic versions since those do actually
seem to work as expected, so there are four weights listed:
 - Light (== Neo Sans Intel Light) 
 - Regular (== Neo Sans Intel Medium)
 - Medium (== Neo Sans Intel Medium)
 - Bold (== Neo Sans Intel Medium + emboldening algorithm?)

I *don't* seem to have an option in GNOME which will just use the straight 'Neo
Sans Intel' font.

So both seem to be getting it wrong, in different ways. Or perhaps there's
something wrong with the fonts themselves?

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[Bug 706559] Font variants not used correctly

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--- Comment #1 from David Woodhouse <dwmw2(a)infradead.org&gt; 2011-05-20 19:16:32 EDT
---
Created attachment 500156
  --> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=500156
LibreOffice with all three fonts displayed in regular, italic and bold face.

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[Bug 706559] Font variants not used correctly

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=706559

--- Comment #2 from David Woodhouse <dwmw2(a)infradead.org&gt; 2011-05-20 19:19:00 EDT
---
Created attachment 500157
  --> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=500157
GNOME (Evolution) font selector showing light style

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[Bug 706559] Font variants not used correctly

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=706559

--- Comment #3 from David Woodhouse <dwmw2(a)infradead.org&gt; 2011-05-20 19:19:43 EDT
---
Created attachment 500158
  --> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=500158
GNOME (Evolution) font selector showing regular style

The 'Medium' option is identical to this

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[Bug 706559] Font variants not used correctly

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=706559

--- Comment #4 from David Woodhouse <dwmw2(a)infradead.org&gt; 2011-05-20 19:20:37 EDT
---
Created attachment 500159
  --> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=500159
GNOME (Evolution) font selector showing bold style

This one definitely seems to be made up, or "emboldened"

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[Bug 706559] Font variants not used correctly

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--- Comment #5 from David Woodhouse <dwmw2(a)infradead.org&gt; 2011-05-20 19:22:05 EDT
---
Created attachment 500163
  --> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=500163
fc-list -v "Neo Sans Intel"

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--- Comment #6 from Behdad Esfahbod <behdad(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; 2011-05-21 19:21:06
EDT ---
This is a known issue that spans multiple modules.  I don't have any immediate
plans to work on it unfortunately :(.

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[Bug 706559] Font variants not used correctly

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--- Comment #7 from David Woodhouse <dwmw2(a)infradead.org&gt; 2011-05-22 06:17:57 EDT
---
I'm trying to package this particular font for internal use. Is there a way to
work around it by using a fontconfig file to disable emboldening and set
appropriate aliases?

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--- Comment #8 from David Woodhouse <dwmw2(a)infradead.org&gt; 2011-05-22 06:20:10 EDT
---
Also, is there an upstream bug or discussion of the issue, that might help me
to overcome my ignorance and devise such a workaround?

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--- Comment #9 from Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot(a)laposte.net&gt; 2011-05-23
07:54:27 EDT ---
You should have patterns of fontconfig aliasing logic in fontpackages-devel
(IIRC they are used by senamirmir fonts, fot example)

They may be enough to fix the styles at the fontconfig level (though style
aliasing is a big mess, it is not as robust as family aliasing)

However, libreoffice is its own can of worms and tries to out-quess fontconfig
so till this libreoffice code is buried you may have different results than in
other apps

Generally speaking, changing the fonts so their metadata is fontconfig-friendly
is usually the best choice.

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--- Comment #10 from David Woodhouse <dwmw2(a)infradead.org&gt; 2011-05-23 09:40:30 EDT
---
(In reply to comment #9)
>  Generally speaking, changing the fonts so their metadata is
> fontconfig-friendly
>  is usually the best choice. 
I ought to be able to do that by taking apart the existing TTF files and
rebuilding them, right? All I need to do is work out what you mean by
'fontconfig-friendly'... :)

In what way is the current metadata, as shown in the attachment in comment 5,
not "fontconfig-friendly"?

Is this a bug in the font, which I should be asking them to fix "upstream", or
just something we don't really cope with very well?

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--- Comment #11 from Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot(a)laposte.net&gt; 2011-05-24
05:10:09 EDT ---
(In reply to comment #10)
>  (In reply to comment #9)
>  > Generally speaking, changing the fonts so their metadata is fontconfig-friendly
>  > is usually the best choice.
>  
>  I ought to be able to do that by taking apart the existing TTF files and
>  rebuilding them, right?  
Yes (if you can do it legally). Change the font in fontforge, or script the
modification with ttx, whatever works best for you

>  All I need to do is work out what you mean by
>  'fontconfig-friendly'... :)
>  
>  In what way is the current metadata, as shown in the attachment in comment 5,
>  not "fontconfig-friendly"? 
I don't claim to know fontconfig/pango innards, but at a guess fontconfig is
confused by the way the fonts declare styles twice, both the legacy way
(regular, bold, italic, with medium in the family name) and the modern way
(with medium in the style name)

Medium is a weight attribute and should only appear in the style name to be
WWS-compliant. Regular is a *different* width attribute so Regular Medium is a
train wreck  (see
http://nim.fedorapeople.org/Understanding%20fonts%20and%20fontconfig.tar.gz
ignore all the parts except the naming section, the fontconfig syntax at the
end is especially unreliable but the naming section is solid)

If you want the full story read
 http://blogs.msdn.com/text/attachment/2249036.ashx
 http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/typotechnica2007/Font%20names.pdf
 http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/atypi2006/CSS%20&%20OT%2015.pdf

Remembering that fontconfig does *not* implement the naming fixing heuristics
described in the Microsoft paper, so for a font to work it needs to declare the
naming that would be produced by this heuristic directly

>  Is this a bug in the font, which I should be asking them to fix
> "upstream", or
>  just something we don't really cope with very well? 
If upstream wants its font to work with Linux they need to change the font yes.
However it may break compatibility with old windows versions and old windows
apps. What confuses fontconfig is probably the info added to make those apps
understand those fonts.

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--- Comment #12 from Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot(a)laposte.net&gt; 2011-05-24
05:27:36 EDT ---
(In reply to comment #11)

>  Medium is a weight attribute  and should only appear in the style
> name to be
>  WWS-compliant. Regular is a *different* width attribute  
weight attribute, not width attribute

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--- Comment #13 from David Woodhouse <dwmw2(a)infradead.org&gt; 2011-05-24 06:21:23 EDT
---
Thanks, Nicolas, for the extremely helpful response, and your presentation.

I'll probably start by trying to provide a fontconfig config file which
'fixes'
the problems, since I'm unlikely to get traction with "upstream". Even when
something is egregiously broken, they don't really like fixing it. It's
probably better for me to have the *same* TTF files as the ones which are
installed on the Windows machines.

Btw, the URL http://blogs.msdn.com/text/attachment/2249036.ashx doesn't seem to
work any more. I could get it from
http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://blogs.msdn.com/text/attachment/22...
though.

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Fedora Admin XMLRPC Client <fedora-admin-xmlrpc(a)redhat.com&gt; changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
         AssignedTo|behdad(a)fedoraproject.org    |mclasen(a)redhat.com

--- Comment #14 from Fedora Admin XMLRPC Client <fedora-admin-xmlrpc(a)redhat.com&gt;
2012-01-10 10:41:56 EST ---
This package has changed ownership in the Fedora Package Database.  Reassigning
to the new owner of this component.

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Fedora Admin XMLRPC Client <fedora-admin-xmlrpc(a)redhat.com&gt; changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
         AssignedTo|mclasen(a)redhat.com          |tagoh(a)redhat.com

--- Comment #15 from Fedora Admin XMLRPC Client <fedora-admin-xmlrpc(a)redhat.com&gt;
2012-03-21 21:38:04 EDT ---
This package has changed ownership in the Fedora Package Database.  Reassigning
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Akira TAGOH <tagoh(a)redhat.com&gt; changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
           Keywords|                            |MoveUpstream
            Version|15                          |rawhide
    External Bug ID|                            |FreeDesktop.org 13416

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[Bug 706559] Font variants not used correctly

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Akira TAGOH <tagoh(a)redhat.com&gt; changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
           Keywords|                            |FutureFeature
            Version|19                          |rawhide

Red Hat Bugzilla <bugzilla(a)redhat.com&gt; changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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           Doc Type|Bug Fix                     |Enhancement



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