Some of the changes:
- A bunch of things get changed to have "fontfig" in their names. Some things are left with names like "fontconfig", though.
- Ignores Preferred Family and Preferred Style. These names cause too many troubles with programs that make assumptions about what constitutes a font family. (I consider this a bug in those programs, which include GIMP and Inkscape on Unix-like platforms.) Also this works around the most galling stupidity in fontconfig, its failure to treat Family-Style in pairs.
- Microsoft platform. Only names for the Microsoft platform are recognized in TrueType and OpenType fonts. In particular, Mac names are ignored; like Preferred Family and Preferred Style, they cause trouble with programs that make assumptions about what constitutes a font family.
- Exact matches: if you ask for something like "Gamera Font:style=Stomping Tokyo" and there is a TrueType or OpenType font with exactly those family and subfamily names, it will match. Letter-case and spaces are significant.
- Changed precendence order. ‘Character set’ and ‘Language’ are moved way down in precedence; because of this change, there is now no difference between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ Family bindings.
- Synthetic italic and bold capability is off by default.
Maybe I'll also end up making changes to how Type 1 fonts are handled, but I forgot to look into that.
Fontfig is a hack; I have ideas on how to make a better variant of fontconfig, but it’s more work than I want to do right now. The most important change would be to treat Family-Style in pairs rather than as separate Family and Style lists. Configurable precedences and per-program settings would be nice.
Download: http://home.comcast.net/~crudfactory/fontfig--fontconfig-2.6.0--patch.2008.07.20.18.17.46.diff
