Hello,

I'm wondering if I can use fonts.config  to make Xft believe that a
range of characters are absent in a TTF/OTF although they're actually
present in the font.  If not, I think it's a feature worth considering.

I hit upon the need for this feature because some Korean fonts (MS Gulim,
MS Batang, etc as included in MS Windows 2k/XP and 9x/ME) and  Pan-Unicode
fonts (such as Arial MS Unicode, Bitstream Cyberbit) have  glyphs for
Hangul Conjoining Jamos (U+1100 - U+11FF) which are almost useless
in that they are just *spacing* as opposed to *combining* required of
Hangul Jamos.  I have CODE2000 with the correct combining glyphs for
Hangul Jamos.  On the other hand, their qualities are otherwise better
than other freely available Korean TTFs/OTFs. Therefore, I'd rather use
them for rendering Korean text other than U+1100 Hangul Jamos barring
the license issue.

While testing Mozilla with Xft patch(2002-10-08), I viewed
http://jshin.net/i18n/korean/hunmin.html with Windows font directory
(which has MS Korean fonts and Arial MS Unicode) before Linux font
directory(/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts, /usr/share/fonts) in fonts.conf
file. Mozilla-UI picks one of fonts in Windows font directory to render
U+1100 Hangul Jamos whereas Hangul Jamos in the page at the URL above are
rendered by code2000 font because I explicitly set the font to CODE2000
in the page.

If fonts.config can be used to make 'Xft' (via 'fontconfig') NOT use
a certain set of fonts for a range of characters, this problem would
be solved.

This may also be useful for some other cases.  For instance, some CJK
fonts may have a complete(not just those encoded in CJK legacy character
sets) set of Greek and Cyrillic letters, but thier quality may not be
so good as dedicated Greek and Cyrillic fonts. By fooling Xft and
other consumers of fontconfig to believe that Cyrillic and Greek
letters are absent in those CJK fonts, one may get a better rendering
result for Cyrilic and Greek letters.

Jungshik

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