bin/50152: fontconfig and tex fonts

[dholland%netbsd.org@localhost]

>Number:         50152
>Category:       bin
>Synopsis:       fontconfig and tex fonts
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       high
>Responsible:    bin-bug-people
>State:          open
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Tue Aug 18 09:05:00 +0000 2015
>Originator:     David A. Holland
>Release:        NetBSD 7.99.20 (20150727)
>Organization:
>Environment:
System: NetBSD macaran 7.99.20 NetBSD 7.99.20 (MACARAN) #30: Mon Jul 27 20:25:15 EDT 2015  dholland@macaran:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/MACARAN amd64
Architecture: x86_64
Machine: amd64
>Description:

I noticed today that fontconfig is not configured to look at tex fonts
in /usr/pkg/share/texmf-dist/fonts. So I tried adding it. In addition
to ostensibly failing (or spewing unhelpful warnings given -v) this
produced results where, in addition to a bunch of useful fonts
previously not accessible, it now offers several thousand fonts with
useless tex names like "grxi1095".

It's enough fonts that inkscape took minutes to load them all, but
that may be inkscape's fault.

This is not a suitable state of affairs:
   1. The useful fonts (provided one has them installed via tex,
      obviously) should be configured by default.
   2. It shouldn't fail or spew warnings. (Even before I started
      mucking about, I was getting warnings/failures from
      /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/encodings, which is a normal part of an
      X11 font tree that it doesn't seem to know what to do with.
   3. It should know how to map the useless tex font names (most of
      which I believe are variations of a much smaller number of real
      fonts) to real font names.

Font handling in Unix is and always has been a disgrace...

>How-To-Repeat:

Add <dir>/usr/pkg/share/texmf-dist/fonts</dir> to /etc/fonts/fonts.conf
or /etc/fonts/local.conf.

Run inkscape, or probably gimp, or any program that loads fonts via
fontconfig. (Although I still often seem to get different fonts from
one application to the next for no clear reason.)

>Fix:
torches and pitchforks, I think.