Re: [ft-devel] family_name for the font without ASCII names

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 01/07/11 00:45, suzuki toshiya wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Recently I found a group of Japanese fonts that requires
> hinting even for ASCII characters, for readable results:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2010-12/msg00021.html
> 
> During the registration of them to tricky font lists,
> I found that these fonts lack ASCII family name. Their
> name tables are for MacJapanese (ShiftJIS) and Microsoft
> Unicode. In both names, the family names are in Japanese,
> not English.
> In such case, current FreeType2 replaces non-ASCII
> character in non-ASCII family name by "?". Thus,
> FT_Face->family_name is set by broken string. There
> is a possibility that the different fonts will have
> same broken family name. However, the PostScript name of
> the fonts I found are still in ASCII.
> 
> I think, a few improvements would be possible.

Generally, we don't care if a font does not have an ASCII name.  What we care
about is that the name and the name encoding are consistent and hence we can
decode and meaningfully represent the name in Unicode.  Why would that fail
with these fonts?

behdad

> A) If we cannot find ASCII family name from WWS family name,
>    preferred family name and (original) family name, try to
>    find ASCII name in PostScript name.
> 
> B) Non-ASCII characters should not be replaced by "?",
>    but escaped, like "\OOO" or "\xXX" or "U+XXXX".
> 
> # Using both is possible.
> 
> Such changes will invalidate the fontconfig database,
> so I want to ask the comment from fontconfig developers/users.
> 
> Regards,
> mpsuzuki
> 
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