VLC fails to fall back through a font family using fontconfig.
The behaviour of VLC 1.1.11 on slackware64 13.37 is that when the subtitle font is set to a font family, VLC sticks to the first font in the family and never bothers to find fallback fonts in the font family.
If a subtitle contains Japanese, Korean, and English, and the first font in a font family doesn't contain 3 languages, then VLC fails to render one or more language(s).
I guess the bug has existed ever since fontconfig was introduced into VLC. Thus, it probably occurs on every platform. It was proven to occur on windows, too.
kwrite and konsole nicely falls back through lots of fonts in a certain family(Examples include Monospace, Serif, etc). konsole even renders lots of languages in UTF-8 encoding reliably.
Let me show you a symptom of that bug. After I set the font to Monospace in VLC preferences dialog, restart VLC, and open the preferences dialog again, you see "Dejavu Sans Mono" instead of Monospace. But ~/.config/vlc/vlcrc still says 'Monospace' if you don't save it. If you save that dialog with "Dejavu Sans Mono", then vlcrc says "Dejavu Sans Mono".
Can anybody please fix this bug?