Am 2020-08-24 14:49, schrieb Nathan Willis:
> Also, Pango and GTK support them in addition to the packages mentioned
> earlier, and there was some work showcased that exploited the
> variation feature as a UI/UX element, such as having text labels in
> GTK widgets grow bolder upon mouseover, so eventually I would expect
> them to become the norm.
Does LibreOffice already support them? How are they presented in the
font chooser?
Named variants already work out of the box; that's transparent through Fontconfig. I lost track of what the variation-axes support was; it seemed like issues I found on the LO bug tracker were not up-to-date.
> It is possible to use update-alternatives to offer users a choice in
> this sort of situation? I am actually curious what the community
> temperature is about that as an approach — if it causes more
> confusion that it does solutions, or if it's regarded as an
> extreme-measures type of packaging tactic.
Please don't add this level of complexity and required user interaction
to font packaging!
I don't understand the strong reaction here. I'm merely asking a question.
If you consider it useful to package variable fonts,
let them just be in a separate package and have this conflict with the
one containing the regular font files. This is the most straightforward
solution and easy to implement - and it also communicates clearly that
variable fonts are not supplementary to regular fonts but that it's one
format or the other.
In what way is conflicting packages a better approach? Would that not risk introducing conflicting dependency sets from other packages? Possibly even deeply nested ones?