[Bug 2129399] Postscript standard symbol font is not looked up correctly

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2129399

--- Comment #26 from Marek Kašík  ---
(In reply to Akira TAGOH from comment #24)
> Not exactly. "Symbol" isn't a sort of generic alias family name such as
> sans-serif. fontconfig just tries to find out a best font against the
> request where may contains "Symbol" in family name. that is almost
> equivarent to find out "Cantarell" as a desktop font in GNOME. If not,
> trying to pick something up by other conditions then.
>
> In that sense, that could be said that we are *just* missing a "Symbol"
> font. This isn't a sort of bug.
>
> If we are going to deal with "Symbol" without any special handling, thus, we
> just need to add a substitute config to the proper font package which has
> enough coverage or metrics compatible for "Symbol".
> To be convenient, we could add it into fontconfig but it won't fix any
> issues without real fonts. so we should find out any candidate font packages
> for that instead of doing something in fontconfig.

I was looking at how to achieve this. I couldn't get the "symbol" flag working
which I supposed would help here (but would need changes in poppler when
creating pattern). Other possibility seems the "prefer" element which works
here for me.

Do you think that adding something like this to config files of suitable fonts
wouldn't break things?:

<alias>
    <family>Symbol</family>
    <prefer><family>DejaVu Sans</family></prefer>
  </alias>