Maciej Piechotka schreef op wo 12-01-2011 om 16:52 [+0100]:
> According to my fast check (which may be wrong) it seems that it does
> not cover still used Greek alphabet (tech people aside it is still
> used in greek language). It does not cover Cyrilic (used among others
> in Russian)
This part of your argument makes sense to me. Greek and Cyrillic are
stylistically closely related to the Latin scripts, since they share a
large part of their history.
Quoting one of the guidelines from The Elements of Typographic Style (a
standard text on type by Robert Bringhurst):
§6.6.1 Choose non-Latin faces as carefully as Latin ones.
[...] The Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets are as closely
related in structure as roman, italic and small caps.
For what it's worth: there are very few typefaces that have really good
coverage for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic in the same typeface — Minion
being a notable exception (non-free though).
> and Chinese and Hindi (I copy the names of national anthem from
> wikipedia) as well.
However, these examples make no sense to me at all. Quoting from The
Elements of Typographic style again:
§6.7.4 Don't mix faces haphazardly when specialized sorts
are required.
The Chinese and Hindi scripts are completely distinct from the European
ones. Those deserve their own typefaces, specifically designed with
those languages in mind. There is no reason Cantarell should address
that.
> That alone would make early 40% of world's
> population according to Wikipedia (sure - probably most Hindi users
> are bilingual but they would still want to see their documents' titles
> - fonts are even more important then translation)[1].
This is something that Pango/FontConfig may address. My guess is that
there is a way to instruct Pango/FontConfig to use a specific set of
typefaces in a specific fallback order.
— Wouter
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