If you read German, take a look at some fossil discussion in
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-german/2003/02/msg00510.html
where similar difficulties appeared a couple of years ago. The critical
paragraph is the one where the responder says (roughly translated):
I've played around with this a little more and found the only
usable method of installing fonts in the system compatibly with
defoma to be the inconvenient way of individual font packages.
It's certainly tedious, but it works.
Above all, you must build the hint-files yourself, so that it can
sort out the fonts. That's fairly tedious for each font, and the
front-ends [i.e., dfontmgr] do nothing but ask for the same data,
which can get pretty tiresome. ...
Then he gives an example for Arial, with all the details. The problem is
that it's difficult for the average user to figure out what the answers
ought to be for all these items. How do you know what are all the Charset
values to use, for example?
A while back, I tried the defoma script that generated hint-files, and
found that it produced a very bare-bones file for each font. I suspect
that this is a problem with a lot of fonts: not enough info in the
hintfiles to allow the substitution engines in defoma and fontconfig to
make the right choices. I suspect that it's these deficient hint-files
that are letting the software make bad choices; the programs could be
completely bug-free, but with missing or misleading info in the
hint-files, what can it do?
One thing that might be useful would be to try to standardize the
terminology used. For example, defoma seems to choose a slightly
different set of terms to describe font weights, widths, etc. than does
fontconfig. The latter lists a set of values for these things in the
fonts.conf manpage; for defoma, you have to go sort through the perl
scripts scattered all over the system to see what values it looks for.
[While on the subject of terminology: see
http://faustus.dyn.ca/mom/momdoc/appendices.html
for yet another incompatible naming system, devised for groff fonts! ]
-- Andy Young
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