Bug 16958

Summary: Feature request: setting some OpenType layout tags for each font
Product: fontconfig Reporter: Vasile Gaburici <gaburici>
Component: libraryAssignee: Keith Packard <keithp>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: low CC: fonts-bugs
Version: 2.5   
Hardware: Other   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:

Description Vasile Gaburici 2008-08-02 03:43:50 UTC 
It would be nice if one could specify some default OpenType tag settings for each font, much like one can specify the anti-aliasing mode etc. Some examples where I think this is useful:
- choosing some stylistic alternates (salt), for instance DejaVu Sans has more easily distinguishable capital I and capital J that can be accessed by turning on salt. It's a bit unreasonable for the user to have to do this in every application, even if all applications supported this feature...
- switching to tabular figures (tnum) for fonts that default to proportional figures. Most applications expect figures to be monospaced. If a font doesn't default to this, things like tables or line numbering can look pretty bad. Granted, the proper way for apps to do this would be to request this feature when needed, e.g. one can do this with XeTeX. But most apps are unaware of OpenType features today...
Comment 1 Behdad Esfahbod 2008-08-12 11:27:10 UTC 
Both cases that you bring up sound like bugs that need to be fixed in the font.

The feature request can be useful though.  However, it can also be implemented in Pango directly with no change in fontconfig required.  I'll keep it in mind.  

When I implement it in pango and after at least some other toolkit (harfbuzz probably) shows interest in implementing it, we can change the element name to drop the "pango" prefix.

I filed the following bug against pango:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=547472

Closing here for now.

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