AHEM_* fonts not suitable for use on GNOME desktops

The fonts AHEM_cursive, AHEM_fantasy, AHEM_monospace,
AHEM_sans-serif, and AHEM_serif contained in
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/Fonts/AhemExtra/ are rather
unsuitable for use on GNOME desktops (the default desktop on Fedora
and Ubuntu).

GNOME uses fontconfig for font handling, and fontconfig's font
handling mechanism is actually based on the 5 CSS font families.
fontconfig (roughly; I'm not an expert) maintains font sets, using
its internal alias mechanism, for these five families, and
recommends that applications use the 5 CSS family names as
appropriate default fonts (which apply across languages).

fontconfig, however, gets very confused if you add a font whose font
name actually has one of these names; the font name overrides the
aliasing mechanism (or something), and the font ends up being the
default font for the characters it provides.

This means the fonts are unsuitable for installing on a GNOME
desktop, since they change all the default fonts (including those in
browsers) to Ahem.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Thursday, 30 September 2010 18:21:51 UTC