Re: ITP: last-resort-font

[Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@Shaw.ca>]

On 2023-09-14 08:31, Jon Turney wrote:
> On 12/09/2023 22:21, Brian Inglis via Cygwin-apps wrote:
>> I would like to offer the following package on Cygwin:
>>
>> * last-resort-font    15.100
>>
>> This package is available in the Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, and OpenSUSE
>> distributions.
>>
>> It is licensed under SIL OFL-1.1.
>>
>> It was originally developed by Apple for macOS, modified to work on
>> non-Apple systems for Unicode.org, and is updated by Michael Everson of
>> Evertype and Unicode.org, and released by Unicode.org in conjunction
>> with the standard, which has just been updated to 15.1.
>>
>> See:
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font#Unicode_Last_Resort_font
> [...]
>>
>> cygport:
>>
>> https://cygwin.com/cgit/cygwin-packages/playground/commit/?id=80da73a6dc50d3997c819ac16132292245bd584a

> Looks good.
> 
> I added this to your packages.
> 
> Thanks.

> Is there some kind of fontconfig configuration file which could be included in 
> this package that this would benefit from, causing it to be used as a glyph 
> fallback font?

Hi Jon,

Thank you!

I researched this and glyph fallback seems more automatic for fontconfig than 
Windows; you can `fc-list :charset=ff010` and only lastresort shows up, whereas 
unifont also appears when I specify a glyph assigned only in Unicode 15.1:

	1F76E 🝮 ALCHEMICAL SYMBOL FOR HOUR

with `fc-list :charset=1f76e`, and perhaps Windows fonts, depending on whether 
you have updated recently.

I looked at unifont, which will be upgraded this weekend, and 
libfontconfig-common sets it up as generic family aliases which prefer fonts 
with lots of real glyphs, so I could copy 
/usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/69-unifont.conf into the package as 
lastresort.conf and newfontconf {,99-}lastresort.conf in install: lastresort is 
the fc-match pattern for the font.

Also rechecking unifont and font.cygclass, last resort also needs an explicit 
REQUIRES=fontconfig, as that is not in font.cygclass.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis              Calgary, Alberta, Canada

La perfection est atteinte                   Perfection is achieved
non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter  not when there is no more to add
mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retirer     but when there is no more to cut
                                 -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry