Re: Specifying different generic font for different weights and styles

Hi Hussein

Well, you may not think it is useful, but your assumptions do
not hold in the general case.

Specifically:

1. "Arial Unicode MS" does NOT have italic and bold weight and
style variants.

2. "Arial Unicode MS" does have good support for all of the Asian
characters, which render very well, especially across multiple
platforms, which is why I use it a lot, without the need to
explicitly specify a different font for Asian characters or
detect the language tag and switch fonts in the stylesheets,
etc.

3. All other FO tools I have used (XEP, Antenna House and even FOP)
have the ability to selectively specify different font families
based upon weight (+/-bold) and style (+/-italic) and so they
do support my use case, where as yours does not.

To illustrate why this is useful, I have attached screenshots of
Word 2011 on the Mac rendering docx output from fo2docx using
no genericFontFamilies font information, using "Arial Unicode MS",
using ordinary "Arial", and using "Calibri" as you suggest.

You will note that only the "Arial Unicode MS" renders the
Japanese characters correctly, and sacrifices the bold for
the headings to achieve that goal.

By contrast, see the screenshot of the PDF output from XEP that
does distinguish fonts not only at the family but also at the
weight/style level, which is my "ideal" output (Asian characters
rendered well, plus bold for heading rendered).

If you can describe a way for me to achieve my objective that your
product supports that does not require this mechanism, e.g.,
identify a font that is freely available across all platforms,
looks as good as "Arial Unicode MS", supports all Unicode code
points AND contains italic and bold variants of them, then I
would be very happy to hear about it.

Otherwise this is IMHO a feature that your tools could benefit
from adding.

David

On 2/27/14 3:25 AM, Hussein Shafie wrote:
> On 02/26/2014 08:31 PM, David Clunie wrote:
>>
>> I just purchased your xfc to use fo2docx and it is working well.
>>
>> However, I need to be able to specify the use of the "Arial Unicode MS"
>> font for ordinary (non-bold, non-italic) text, and "Arial Bold",
>> "Arial Italic", etc. for the variants, since "Arial Unicode MS"
>> does not contain those (but I need it for various languages like
>> Japanese).
>>
>> Specifying:
>>
>> "-genericFontFamilies=sans-serif=Arial Unicode MS"
>>
>> as an argument to fo2docx works just fine to make all "sans-serif"
>> text use this font, but of course all the bold and italic information
>> is lost.
>
> No, not at all. Please replace "Arial Unicode MS" by Calibri and you'll
> see that it works as expected. Explanations below.
>
>
>
>>
>> I need something like:
>>
>> "-genericFontFamilies=sans-serif=Arial Unicode MS, sans-serif-bold=Arial
>> Bold,
>> sans-serif-italic=Arial Italic,sans-serif-bold-italic=Arial Bold Italic"
>
> The specification you describe is not useful in the general case and as
> such is not implemented.
>
> sans-serif=FOO means that the sans-serif *font* *family* (AKA
> *typeface*) to be used is FOO.
>
> Therefore because FOO is a typeface, it is assumed that all the
> following *fonts* exist:
>
> FOO
> FOO Bold
> FOO Oblique or FOO Italic.
> FOO Bold Oblique or FOO Bold Italic.
>
> This is always the case, except for special typefaces such as Symbol,
> Dingbats, etc.
>
>
>
>
>>
>> I had expected there would have been some sort of configuration file
>> to feed to fo2docx to specify all the font substitution stuff (e.g.,
>> like one uses with XEP), but could not find one.
>>
>
> There is no such configuration file. The documentation is up to date:
>
> http://www.xmlmind.com/foconverter/_distrib/doc/user/index.html
>
> please refer to it, as the support we provide our customers with is
> quite limited:
>
> http://www.xmlmind.com/foconverter/support_policy.html
>
>
>
>


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