Should we expect Liberation fonts to be installed?

Scott Ritchie scott at open-vote.org
Sat Aug 7 22:02:16 CDT 2010


On 08/03/2010 01:57 PM, Scott Ritchie wrote:
> I was looking through our fairly large collection of open font bugs and
> realized that things might be a lot simpler if we took some opinionated
> positions and just declared certain fonts to be dependencies and
> expected all packagers to provide them.
> 
> This is similar to bundling our own Tahoma, except much less work.
> 
> 
> This bug, for instance, prevents Photoshop from working unless there is
> an Arial font installed: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9623
> 
> Wine doesn't seem to respect system-level fontconfig aliases, so even
> though Liberation Sans is installed on the system Photoshop won't try to
> use it in place of Arial.
> 
> But if however we assumed that Liberation Sans was installed, we could
> make things much better: a link/substitution for Arial->Liberation Sans
> could be provided in our own registry (and similarly for Times New Roman
> and Courier).  An alternative is to simply symlink to the Liberation
> Fonts in /usr/share/wine/fonts as though they were our own shipped fonts
> (like Tahoma).
> 
> This would make Photoshop think Arial was present and keep it
> functional.  Ideally the real Arial would be displayed if it was
> installed (eg through winetricks corefonts or by installing the
> distro-provided corefonts package).
> 
> 
> A related question is whether to show "Arial" in the list of fonts (eg
> notepad) when we're actually just providing a substituted Arial.  My
> inclination says no, however I'm not sure how it works internally and
> what an application would expect.
> 

Assuming for a moment this is a good idea, what's the best
implementation?  My inclination is to say some registry font links, but
I'm not completely familiar with how that works.

Will font links in the registry be ignored when the real font is present?

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie



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