Fontconfig in KT 5.1.2 stops synthetically emboldening for fonts?

[silverzhao]

It seems that the fontconfig in KT 5.1.2 doesn't synthetically embolden for fonts that do not have bold face available any more.

So now if I only have a font of type Regular, I'll have to create a bold one manually for it. This is so boring and time-consuming, in addition to occupying more root partition.

I've looked through the configuration files in /etc/fonts/conf.d but find nothing helpful.

Could you guys confirm this? Thanks!

[yiming]

yes, i've tried on KT 5.1.0 and it would not synthetically embolden regular fonts. i've even tried the following config, but was also unsuccessful.

<!--
 Synthetic emboldening for fonts that do not have bold face available
 -->

 <match target="font">
  <!-- check to see if the font is just regular -->
  <test name="weight" compare="less_eq">
   <const>medium</const>
  </test>
  <!-- check to see if the pattern requests bold -->
  <test target="pattern" name="weight" compare="more">
   <const>medium</const>
  </test>
  <!--
    set the embolden flag
    needed for applications using cairo, e.g. gucharmap, gedit, ...
  -->
  <edit name="embolden" mode="assign">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
  <!--
   set weight to bold
   needed for applications using Xft directly, e.g. Firefox, ...
  -->
  <edit name="weight" mode="assign">
   <const>bold</const>
  </edit>
 </match>

not sure if it will help if you install the freetype library available on this forum.

[silverzhao]

Originally Posted by yiming

yes, i've tried on KT 5.1.0 and it would not synthetically embolden regular fonts. i've even tried the following config, but was also unsuccessful.
...
not sure if it will help if you install the freetype library available on this forum.

Well, I saw this in /etc/fonts/conf.d/90-synthetic.conf, and I've even tried to add this directly to local.conf, but it doesn't work.

I don't know whether this is the problem of fontconfig or freetype since the update. Maybe I'll try the freetype on this forum then to check it.

[silverzhao]

Originally Posted by yiming

yes, i've tried on KT 5.1.0 and it would not synthetically embolden regular fonts. i've even tried the following config, but was also unsuccessful.
...
not sure if it will help if you install the freetype library available on this forum.

OK, I've tried libfreetype.so 6.8.1 downloaded from here on my KT.

It's good that regular fonts of the main body text in a book finally have synthetic emboldenings now.

However, in Menu --> Go To, the fonts of contents doesn't have synthetic emboldenings yet, which is I mainly target for. By the way, the font here is wqy-microhei, as the preferred sans-serif font for Chinese, which is configured in the file /etc/fonts/local.conf.

Do you have any suggestions? Thank you!

[yiming]

Originally Posted by silverzhao

OK, I've tried libfreetype.so 6.8.1 downloaded from here on my KT.

It's good that regular fonts of the main body text in a book finally have synthetic emboldenings now.

However, in Menu --> Go To, the fonts of contents doesn't have synthetic emboldenings yet, which is I mainly target for. By the way, the font here is wqy-microhei, as the preferred sans-serif font for Chinese, which is configured in the file /etc/fonts/local.conf.

Do you have any suggestions? Thank you!

sorry, won't be able to help. in fact, i didn't install libfreetype.so, because the last time i did that it caused instability in my KT. i've assigned bold font in a customised 99chinese.conf instead.