I wasn't sure if I should post this to the devel or user list. A coin toss decided on this one. First of all, I'd like to praise the author of the patch at http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2008-July/057033.html for "brilliance of simplicity". As I have all the fonts I needed, it annoyed me a lot that wine was displaying boxes in dialogs, instead of correct glyphs. With that patch, fonts are correctly displayed without any further tweaking. I still probably need to construct a fontconfig rule to tweak it a little bit (mainly antialiasing), but those are just details.
Now, for the questions: 1. Do I understand correctly, that this rule should be for Tahoma or should it be another font ? 2. Is there any mechanism to emulate what AppLocale does in a sane way (no, LANG override does not count, it puts whole wine into a different locale, instead of only the app; while that works for most apps, it seems that some make silly assumptions based on locale, like 'what "My Documents" folder is called', also I don't want wine debug messages in a language I can't read fluently) ?
Maybe it would be a good idea to expose for the user some of the changes, locale switch makes, so the user could decide which of them are needed, so it could be possible to i.e. run a program with only default ansi charset changed.