some utf8 chars are terrible small.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Aidan Kehoe writes:

 > Fontconfig is *far worse* in this issue,

Far worse in what issue?  I can't see how it can possibly fail to be a
big improvement in terms of font sizing.  Fontconfig basically doesn't
work without Xft, so you're pretty much guaranteed scalable fonts.
Personally, I've not seen font size issues (once I fixed the X
configuration to get the DPI right), except for a couple of
foot-shooting incidents (ie, I specified dpi= in a font resource in
.Xresources, and then fiddled with the global DPI value).

It's true that the fonts.conf that comes with Debian and Gentoo (which
I believe is basically f.d.o's config) does a poor job of finding
appropriate fonts.

But if LibreOffice 3 and Firefox 4 and 5 are any evidence, GTK+pango
is no panacea for that, either.  The problem of finding good fallback
fonts for "rare" characters (and sometimes, merely a reasonable
substitute for Microsoft fonts) is just a non-easy problem unless you
have full coverage fonts.

Disclaimer: I've got a lot invested in Xft, and I intend to spend some
time on it in the next few months.  So maybe I'm excessively
optimistic about it, and pessimestic about GTK2/pango.  But I'm happy
to see the work on GTK2/pango pushing forward, and I don't deny
there's a strong possibility that it will turn out to be better that
what we've currently got with less effort than needed to do a decent
job on Xft.