Bug#683192: fontconfig: Default font and/or fallback font selection algorithm fails for non-latin fonts

Package: fontconfig
Version: 2.8.0-3.1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

I apologize for my ignorance on the subject and I ask you to reassign this bug
as appropriate.

It seems that whatever algorithm the "fonts' subsystem" is using to select the
fonts it will export as 'serif', 'sans-serif' etc., it is making bad choices
for non-latin scripts.
In particular:

1) Open up icedove and try to compose a message in Greek. Icedove will report
the font as 'sans-serif' and the text will look nice.
2) Install package ttf-bitstream-vera.
3) Repeat step one. Now some fonts (noticeably the small greek letter pi) will
look quite ugly. It seems a math font is being used, which does not look
acceptably good in normal text.
4) Removing ttf-bitstream-vera fixes the problem.

Installing a new font on your system should not break installed apps, hence I
am reporting this as a bug. In particular Bitstream Vera (as fas as I know)
does not contain a Greek script (expept perhaps the troublesome letter pi), and
hence is not suitable as a default global 'sans-serif' font. Alternatively, the
fallback Greek script should be selected (as a whole) out of a font which
supports the whole range of Greek characters.

Thanks,
Panayiotis



Debian Release: wheezy/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages fontconfig depends on:
ii fontconfig-config 2.9.0-6
ii libc6 2.13-30
ii libexpat1 2.1.0-1
ii libfontconfig1 2.9.0-6
ii libfreetype6 2.4.9-1
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.7.dfsg-13

fontconfig recommends no packages.

Versions of packages fontconfig suggests:
ii defoma 0.11.12



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