On 2023-01-20 18:56:46 +0000, Simon McVittie wrote: > On Wed, 18 Jan 2023 at 15:35:54 +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > After the upgrade from fontconfig 2.13.1-4.5 to fontconfig 2.14.1-3, > > the selection of the Bitstream font is broken > > There is no font of that name in Debian. Bitstream is (was?) a font > foundry, not a font, so asking for a font named "Bitstream" is like > asking for an application named "Microsoft" if what you actually wanted > was Microsoft Word.
Yes, I don't know what I put only "Bitstream", probably because it worked with no warnings or errors (I've got this setting since 2010). Anyway... > > With fontconfig 2.13.1-4.5, > > > > cventin% fc-match Bitstream > > Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman" > > > > With fontconfig 2.14.1-3, > > > > cventin% fc-match Bitstream > > NotoSans-Regular.ttf: "Noto Sans" "Regular" > > I can reproduce this. I think this is happening because you don't have any > font named "Bitstream" installed (and neither do I), so fontconfig is > falling back to looking for *any* font, for which its default seems to be > to go through a list of sans-serif fonts in preference order: > > $ fc-match "Bitstream Vera Sans" > Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Roman" > $ fc-match "Bitstream" > NotoSans-Regular.ttf: "Noto Sans" "Regular" > $ fc-match "hello, world" > NotoSans-Regular.ttf: "Noto Sans" "Regular" This doesn't behave as documented in the fc-match(1) man page: "fc-match matches pattern (empty pattern by default) [...]" This is a pattern matching. Even with explicit wildcards, this doesn't work: $ fc-match "*Bitstream*" NotoSans-Regular.ttf: "Noto Sans" "Regular" > So I think this is probably working as intended, and the configuration > change that prompted your different font rendering is that fontconfig > 2.13.1 had Bitstream Vera Sans as its fallback font, whereas 2.14.1 has > Noto Sans and DejaVu Sans listed as its preferred sans-serif fonts for > Latin text, as a result of > <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/fontconfig/fontconfig/-/commit/fcb042028126d79ea5a5fa015b2b034b98656e73> > and then > <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/fontconfig/fontconfig/-/commit/ad70d785974992c569b30108923875e5b5e9dc5e>. This change was not announced. I think that the change of the default font is quite a big change. I've just noticed that I also did a mistake when I retrieved the /etc/fonts contents to compare them, which led the symlinks to be excluded. :( [...] > However, Bitstream Vera is essentially unmaintained, so consider using > the DejaVu family (community-maintained forks of Bitstream Vera with > wider glyph coverage, which had to change the name for licensing reasons) > from the fonts-dejavu-core and optionally fonts-dejavu-extra packages, > in preference to ttf-bitstream-vera. Yes, I already use the DejaVu family in some other applications (Emacs, Firefox). -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
