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In cairo, fonts can be specified by their family name, e.g. 'HelveticaNeueLTStd'. Then, weights and styles can be defined by cairo.FONT_WEIGHT_[NORMAL|BOLD] and cairo.FONT_SLANT_[NORMAL|OBLIQUE|ITALIC], which are constants with integer values. Only these 2 and 3 options are built in. I am wondering, how to select specific weights and styles in case the family have more of them? E.g. Light, Semi-bold, etc.

I am using pycairo 1.10.0 in python 2.7, although these things looks the same in any language.

I could find the solution by guessing, so I will answer my question, but still I am wondering if this is the standard way of doing.

deeenes
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1 Answers1

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Font files have various names and other annotations. In FontForge, you can find these listed in menu Element > Font info. Here as I found cairo is able to identify the font by its TTF names > Family or which is the same its WindowsString. In case of Adobe's Helvetica Neue light this string has the value 'HelveticaNeueLT Std Lt'. Then selecting the font by this name, and setting the slant and weight to normal, the light weight will be used:

context.select_font_face('HelveticaNeueLT Std Lt', \
    cairo.FONT_SLANT_NORMAL, cairo.FONT_WEIGHT_NORMAL)

It is possible to find font names by many softwares. On Linux fontconfig is able to list fonts, and the name in the second column what cairo recognizes:

$ fc-list | grep HelveticaNeue
...
/usr/share/fonts/.../HelveticaNeueLTStd-Lt.otf: Helvetica Neue LT Std,HelveticaNeueLT Std Lt:style=45 Light,Regular
...
$ fc-list | sed 's/.*:\(.*,\|\s\)\(.*\):.*/\2/'
...
HelveticaNeueLT Std Lt
...
deeenes
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