Originally reported in Red Hat bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=466678 Beginning with the release of Fedora 7 in May 2007, fonts belonging to Arial Narrow group began to be merged with ordinary Arial - there was no longer a separate Arial Narrow family in the font selector, only Arial. The narrow styles were supposed to be added to the Arial family, but the problem is that it is impossible to select the Narrow glyphs afterwards. With LANG=C, the situation is the least broken: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=347200 Regular narrow can be selected, but narrow italic, narrow bold and narrow bold italic cannot. With LANG=pl_PL: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=320146 even narrow regular is gone. Also, please note that the styles are displayed in pretty random languages. fc-list seems to list all eight styles fine: $ fc-list | grep Arial | sort Arial Black:style=Normalny,Normal,obyčejné,Standard,Κανονικά,Regular,Normaali,Normál,Normale,Standaard,Обычный,Normálne,Navadno,Arrunta Arial,Arial Narrow:style=Kursywa,Narrow,Cursiva,kurzíva,kursiv,Πλάγια,Italic,Kursivoitu,Italique,Dőlt,Corsivo,Cursief,Itálico,Курсив,İtalik,Poševno,Etzana Arial,Arial Narrow:style=Normalny,Narrow,Normal,obyčejné,Standard,Κανονικά,Regular,Normaali,Normál,Normale,Standaard,Обычный,Normálne,Navadno,Arrunta Arial,Arial Narrow:style=Pogrubiona kursywa,Narrow,Negreta cursiva,tučné kurzíva,fed kursiv,Fett Kursiv,Έντονα Πλάγια,Bold Italic,Negrita Cursiva,Lihavoitu Kursivoi,Gras Italique,Félkövér dőlt,Grassetto Corsivo,Vet Cursief,Halvfet Kursiv,Negrito Itálico,Полужирный Курсив,Tučná kurzíva,Fet Kursiv,Kalın İtalik,Krepko poševno,Lodi etzana Arial,Arial Narrow:style=Pogrubiony,Narrow,Negreta,tučné,fed,Fett,Έντονα,Bold,Negrita,Lihavoitu,Gras,Félkövér,Grassetto,Vet,Halvfet,Negrito,Полужирный,Fet,Kalın,Krepko,Lodia Arial:style=Kursywa,Cursiva,kurzíva,kursiv,Πλάγια,Italic,Kursivoitu,Italique,Dőlt,Corsivo,Cursief,Itálico,Курсив,İtalik,Poševno,nghiêng,Etzana Arial:style=Normalny,Normal,obyčejné,Standard,Κανονικά,Regular,Normaali,Normál,Normale,Standaard,Обычный,Normálne,Navadno,thường,Arrunta Arial:style=Pogrubiona kursywa,Negreta cursiva,tučné kurzíva,fed kursiv,Fett Kursiv,Έντονα Πλάγια,Bold Italic,Negrita Cursiva,Lihavoitu Kursivoi,Gras Italique,Félkövér dőlt,Grassetto Corsivo,Vet Cursief,Halvfet Kursiv,Negrito Itálico,Полужирный Курсив,Tučná kurzíva,Fet Kursiv,Kalın İtalik,Krepko poševno,nghiêng đậm,Lodi etzana Arial:style=Pogrubiony,Negreta,tučné,fed,Fett,Έντονα,Bold,Negrita,Lihavoitu,Gras,Félkövér,Grassetto,Vet,Halvfet,Negrito,Полужирный,Fet,Kalın,Krepko,đậm,Lodia The only applications that seem to be able to distinguish between the narrow glyphs are firefox and KDE's font installer. Please let me know if I can provide any other information.
For reference, this is on an up-to-date Fedora 10 x86_64, with fontconfig-2.6.0-3.fc10. I did dome testing with Fedora 11, but unfortunately the situation did not seem to have improved.
I'm pretty sure this is a pango bug, not fontconfig. There are multiple bugs open for it in pango's bugzilla. See for example: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563862
The bug you linked to was opened by me, as suggested by nim-nim. We were not sure where it belonged.
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