I was looking through our fairly large collection of open font bugs and realized that things might be a lot simpler if we took some opinionated positions and just declared certain fonts to be dependencies and expected all packagers to provide them.
This is similar to bundling our own Tahoma, except much less work.
This bug, for instance, prevents Photoshop from working unless there is an Arial font installed: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9623
Wine doesn't seem to respect system-level fontconfig aliases, so even though Liberation Sans is installed on the system Photoshop won't try to use it in place of Arial.
But if however we assumed that Liberation Sans was installed, we could make things much better: a link/substitution for Arial->Liberation Sans could be provided in our own registry (and similarly for Times New Roman and Courier). An alternative is to simply symlink to the Liberation Fonts in /usr/share/wine/fonts as though they were our own shipped fonts (like Tahoma).
This would make Photoshop think Arial was present and keep it functional. Ideally the real Arial would be displayed if it was installed (eg through winetricks corefonts or by installing the distro-provided corefonts package).
A related question is whether to show "Arial" in the list of fonts (eg notepad) when we're actually just providing a substituted Arial. My inclination says no, however I'm not sure how it works internally and what an application would expect.
Thanks, Scott Ritchie