909106 - Make gfx.printing fontconfig property visible to user config

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Printing: Output, enhancement)

Description

[Raimund Steger]

Attachment: gfx-printing.diff

At the moment, when a page is printed from Mozilla, the fontconfig property "gfx.printing" is added to the fontconfig pattern after the call to FcConfigSubstitute in gfx/thebes/gfxPangoFonts.cpp.

I wonder if it could be a suggestion to add this property to the pattern /before/ the call to FcConfigSubstitute. That way, users can select different font substitutes for printed webpages as part of their fontconfig configuration. I've attached a patch that I now use to do this exact thing. I do realize that exposing an internally used property such as this as user-visible API is probably not an easy decision to make. So please do regard this bug as an absolutely optional idea.

(I think that in the best of worlds, Mozilla could instead add a "dpi" property and/or adjusted pixelsize that reflects the expected DPI resolution of the surface to fontconfig configuration. However, it's probably not that easy to come up with a reasonable value, particularly for PDF output etc.)

Comment 1

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

Seems like gfx.printing moved to:

https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/gfx/thebes/gfxFcPlatformFontList.cpp

Is this something you still want, Raimund?

Comment 2

[Raimund Steger]

Well I think it could still be useful yes, but I've learned to live without it. It's only an issue for pages that are rendered with bitmap fonts, to enable the user to map this to something different for printer or PDF.
It's been years since I was last affected by this so feel free to close this.