@vidak Make them aware that none of those systems can properly handle fonts.

Go look for yourself. See how fontconfig’s pattern matching works, and how it ruins every program that uses it.

All it takes is a font family that has a small caps font in addition to the regular. There is then a 50/50 chance fontconfig will mistake the small caps font for the regular.

And this is THE DOCUMENTED BEHAVIOR OF FONTCONFIG. It is how the author designed it. He ignored the OpenType spec.

@vidak Tell them there is no point in making a bug report. No one will even try to understand the issue or fix it, because the fix is to rid the platform of fontconfig. They will call it ‘A known bug in fontconfig’ and then go on ignoring it.

I have been frustrated over this for about 20 years, since I discovered it. The few times I came back to try to inform the community again, I was again sent away.

(I am a Google Fonts contributor, and also once of the fontforge project.)

@vidak (But some jackass who got angry with me went through the fontforge code and made up excuses to remove commits I had made.

There are still some contributions from the George Williams days, though. They are likely anonymous.)

@vidak The explanation for why fontconfig does this is obvious.

The author wished to write a naive pattern matcher. So he invented a problem that could be solved by one.

The problem of selecting the correct font is solved in part by the OpenType specification. But it was unnecessary to consult that, to solve the problem of how to make an excuse to write a naive pattern matcher.

@vidak One can put workarounds in a fonts.conf, but this requires programming skill. And it would be extremely involved and unreliable for a large Adobe Opticals family.