Re: Aliases in 2.2.x

[Christopher James Lahey <clahey ximian com>]

On Thu, 2003-02-13 at 03:10, Chema Celorio wrote:
...
> So ... I was thinking that gnome_font_find_closest could ask fontconfig
> for a font, then map that result (by fc_file?) to an entry in the
> gnome-print fontmap and return that. _find_closest is not very smart
> right now and rarely does the right thing.
> 
> The benefit of this is that strings like "Times", "Sans" will work,
> since fontconfig will match them and we'll return our alias "Sans
> Regular", the downside is that the API is now not well defined and every
> piece of code is going to use different defaults, which might not be
> reliable since we depend on the contents of /etc/fonts/fonts.conf for it
> to work.
> 
> Or maybe just proper documentation will do.
> 
> Font families will still need to be strict to get the right aliases.
> 
> Just at thought at this point ;-). Comments?

My thought is that we should just let fontconfig deal with it.  I don't
completely follow your description, but if fontconfig can deal with
Times and map that to Serif, we should let it do that.

This would make it work well with things where the user chooses a font. 
That way, the app could just pass in the font that the user chose, and
if it displays on the screen, it'll print fine.

If we just document it, that means that many apps will have to make this
transformation on their own.  This is silly, since that's almost the
entire point of fontconfig.

Thanks,
    Chris