Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 82125
Creates bogus 'bold' entries in fonts.scale
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:04 EDT
Description of problem: 'ttmkfdir' creates bold *and* medium entries for regular fonts: ----- ## install e.g. ttfonts-ja $ cp /usr/share/fonts/ja/TrueType/kochi-gothic.ttf . $ ttmkfdir $ cat fonts.scale ... kochi-gothic.ttf -misc-Kochi Gothic-bold-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-adobe-standard ... kochi-gothic.ttf -misc-Kochi Gothic-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-c-0-adobe-standard ... ----- This seems to happens with any regular ttf font and is bad because application which are trying to display bold fonts are using the medium style. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): ttmkfdir-3.0.7-1
Yeah, that is intented behavior, but right now, ttmkfdir will only do that for X FreeType backend. The reason we do it this way is current FreeType backend still can not generate bold and italic fonts, with those extra bogus entries, applications can be more robust. There was one old KDE bug(also in bugzilla, couldn't find it now) that if there are no bold or italic entries, the corresponding bold or italic characters will be unreadable. Not sure if the bug is still with KDE, but I think there are other applictions still can not handle it.
This new behavior causes problems when both regular and bold fonts are installed. E.g. when using M$ webfonts, I have arial-medium in arial.ttf and arial-bold in arialbd.ttf. 'ttmkfdir' creates the following entries in fonts.scale: | arial.ttf -monotype-Arial-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-ascii-0 | ... | arial.ttf -monotype-Arial-bold-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-ascii-0 | arialbd.ttf -monotype-Arial-bold-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-ascii-0 When having an application which wants to use 'arial-bold', xfs chooses the first matching entry. In this case this is the regular font from arial.ttf and the application will display the information non-boldly although a bold font is available. I think that applications should be fixed which are not robust without bold/italic fonts. On the first glance, omitting additional 'bold' entries seems to prevent this problem but this does not work when 'arial.ttf' and 'arialbd.ttf' are in different directories.
Yeah, I thought about this before, but if there are fonts like those, I will revert it. Thanks!