> I have also a laptop running sid, and kde. I am able to use DejaVu > Serif Condensed font. I don't fully understand why desktop is unable > to use the font. > > Please advise.
Two possible causes: * you're using an old DejaVu version (< 2.9) * you're not using the newest fontconfig (2.4.2). The reason why: we set in DejaVu 2.9 the so called "preferred family" and "preferred subfamily" tags. That didn't really affect anyone back then since there was nothing that supported it in the Linux world. The idea behind these preferred families is that some environments only support four styles of the same font (regular, italic, bold and bold italic). Any other style that would belong to that family cannot be accessed. Hence we have two different "family" names for the normal and the condensed faces. example in dejavu: sans book: family: dejavu sans; subfamily: book sans condensed book: family: dejavu condensed sans; subfamily: book However, more advanced programs can handle more than four font styles, so you want to be able to tell in a font that condensed fonts are really from the same family as the regular ones. That's why "preferred family/subfamily" was added: these ones have the names advanced programs should use. example in dejavu: sans book: pref. family: dejavu sans; pref. subfamily: book sans condensed book: pref. family: dejavu sans; pref. subfamily: condensed As said, no-one probably noticed these new tags until fontconfig 2.4.2 came out: fontconfig now suddenly started using the preferred families of a font. Which had the consequence that all software depending on fontconfig now all saw the condensed sans fonts in the one big "dejavu sans" family. Now, unfortunately Qt (and thus also KDE) doesn't support condensed fonts variants in the same family. Consequence: no condensed fonts from dejavu in KDE anymore. So after this little history, the possible solutions if you want to have condensed: * fix Qt -- the only proper way, but the most difficult one of course. * patch fontconfig to disable preferred families, bug #401411 can help, but then you'll disable them for all other fonts and for gnome (which supports more styles in the same font a little bit better) * or just don't upgrade to fontconfig 2.4.2 and keep using 2.4.1 * patch DejaVu to remove the preferred family tags. I hope this clarifies the complete situation about this and explains why people get different results sometimes. Greetings Ben -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
