Font selection issues (style collapsing) in Gnome 2.18 (pango)

[cosmix]

With a number of more 'exotic' (often commercial) fonts that do not follow the Regular/Italic/Bold/Bold Italic structure, Gnome applications (and by extension, most probably Pango) in Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Beta 1 is unable to properly present and use available fonts. More specifically it collapses styles together. For example, supposing a font contains styles "Light", "Regular", "Semibold", "Bold" and "Black" each having roman and oblique (italic) variants. Gnome (pango) displays all of the possible choices, but selecting a number of them would result in the same font style. e.g. selecting 'regular' and 'light' would both use the 'light' style.

This is probably a regression from earlier versions, as Edgy and Dapper did not exhibit this behaviour (Breezy did). This is also well-documented in the Gnome Bugzilla repository (apologies, bugzilla.gnome.org is offline at the time of filing this bug) and also mentioned in the freedesktop bugzilla repository. However, this does not seem like a fontconfig issue, but a pango issue. KDE 3.5.6 included in 'Feisty Beta 1' properly presents AND uses all installed font and does not exhibit this behaviour.

While it might be possible, in some cases, to overcome this problem by using a custom .fonts.conf with <match> this should not be required for the fonts to work properly in a typical installation. Typical fonts that exhibit this issue are included in families provided by BT (Bitstream) and Adobe.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug. Could you give the bugzilla URL corresponding?

[cosmix (cosm7x)]

You're very welcome. H'ere

There seem to be several bugs on this, dating from 2002 to date.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95043
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6255

and a thread from the fontconfig mailing list.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2005-March/001241.html

Hope this helps.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Opening an upstream task, the desktop team is already overworked and the bug is not high importance

[cosmix (cosm7x)]

Be advised that this bug persists in Gutsy Beta (1) with Gnome 2.20.0. Based on the discussion that has taken place in the mailing lists and bug tracking facilities upstream, this does not seem to be getting resolved at that level any time soon.

Given the increased importance of DTP/Graphics (as implied by the release of Ubuntu Studio some weeks after Feisty) and the fact that a large number of commercial fonts are practically unusable under Gnome, perhaps a review of the this bug might be in order.

[cosmix (cosm7x)]

Note: Bug seems to have been fixed on Hardy Beta 1 (GNOME 2.22.0, pango 1.20.0-1). Recommend that you close the bug.

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

This bug report is being closed due to your last comment regarding this being fixed with an update. For future reference you can manage the status of your own bugs by clicking on the current status in the yellow line and then choosing a new status in the revealed drop down box. You can learn more about bug statuses at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Status . Thank you again for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Feel free to submit any future bugs you may find.

[cosmix (cosm7x)]

Dimitri,

Thanks. I am well aware as to how bugs are closed. Was just being cautious (and polite) so as to avoid regressions; they seem to occur more than often with fontconfig/pango.