Font selection logic defective?

[Bill Medland]

(Huw?)

Do I need to dig deeper to understand this or is there a defect in the logic.
If there are ttf fonts available does that mean a poor ttf match will be 
selected even when a better x11drv font is available?

Note that my font knowledge is quite minimal

Context
When I installed our product on a clean Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 test 
machine it looked relatively acceptable.
However on my own development machine (again RHEL3) for several texts the font 
was too large and overflowed the area that had been allocated for it.
Then when I installed on Mandrake 10.0 I noticed the same large fonts.

So I dug.

On my machine (and probably on the Mandrake too; I don't know since I've 
trashed it) OpenOffice.org is installed.  It installs 
/usr/share/fonts/openoffice, containing Vera*.ttf.

As an example the Splash screen asks for an Arial font.  My development 
machine runs through the fonts it knows about and selects the Bitstream Vera 
Sans, which is not a good match.

The test machine has no ttf files to work from and so it reverses the 
Helvetica-Arial substitution (Hm!!! poor registry setup, I reckon) and 
performs a match for a Helvetica font and finds a much more acceptable font. 

So it seems to me that merely because OpenOffice.org has installed a couple of 
ttf fonts my development machine will select from a small list of ttf fonts 
and ignore a large list of x11 fonts.

Am I correct?
What should we do?  Get the font matching logic to look at both the sets of 
fonts?  Or add some sort of "Ignore these fonts" list in the Wine fonts area?

-- 
Bill Medland
mailto:billmedland at mercuryspeed.com
http://webhome.idirect.com/~kbmed