arial narrow is broken since Fedora 8

[Julian Sikorski]

Hi,

first of all I'd like to apologise for cross-posting this to this list,
but the bugs I filed at rhbz [1] and freedesktop bugzilla [2] did not
seem to attract enough attention.
The problem is as follows: IIRC in Fedora 8 timeframe it was decided to
allow more font substyles than the 4 basic bold, italic, bold italic and
normal. As a fallout of this, Arial Narrow font started to be treated as
a substyle of Arial. Nice idea altogether, but the problem is that now
applications (with the notable exceptions of firefox and KDE's
systemsettings) do not seem to be able to distinguish between arial and
arial narrow. KDE's font selector displays four styles, gtk font
selector displays 8 styles, with each of the basic ones being displayed
twice (no difference whichever of the two is selected), openoffice does
not work either. All in all, all documents which were using arial narrow
now refuse to render properly. Is there anything we could do to work
around this issue? Some sort of quirk?

Regards,
Julian

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=466678
[2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13416