Re: [doc] Fwd: Please set TT_NAME_ID_PREFERRED_FAMILY for Kacst fonts

[Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug dot org>]

“Preferred Family” per the spec[1] (name ID 16) is for font families
that have more than four styles (for example families that has more than
two weights like bold, demibold regular, thin, hair etc, or families
that has both italic and slanted, in addition to the regular styles).
This means “Preferred Family” is essentially the same as “Font Family”
(name id 1) except that it can be applied to more than four styles (the
only reason “Preferred Family” was introduced is that Windows allows no
more than four font files to have the same “Font Family”).

Now Kacst fonts are all different families that happen to have just one
style each (most of them) and the only thing common between them is the
“Kacst” word in the names, they no more belong to the same family than
Times and Courier belong to the same one.

Regards,
Khaled

1. http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/name.htm


On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 09:03:14PM -0400, Youssef Chahibi wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail dot com>
> Date: Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 12:32 PM
> Subject: Please set TT_NAME_ID_PREFERRED_FAMILY for Kacst fonts
> To: contact at arabeyes dot org
> 
> 
> At the moment the family is not common for the different files, for
> instance:
> 
> KacstArt.ttf = "KacstArt"
> KacstBook.ttf = "KacstBook"
> 
> As I understand it, TT_NAME_ID_PREFERRED_FAMILY is supposed to be the
> same for all files in the same high-level family, and this seems to be
> what most other fonts do in Linux. For the next release could you
> please set the PreferredFamily key to just "Kacst" in all 14 files.
> This allows component installers like gnome-software to group the
> fonts together rather than showing them as separate entries.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Richard.