Re: Amharic Experience w/GNOME 2

[Keith Packard <keithp keithp com>]

Around 10 o'clock on Oct 28, Daniel Yacob wrote:

> Now I've got english again at the command line but the font settings
> mess up the terminal.  I go to change fonts under the current profile
> and I'm shown a very limited number of choices.  Not finding the UCS
> font (under "misc-fixed") I was looking for I open an "xterm -u8" with
> my font of choice, exit gnome-terminal, and get to work.

That might be because the gnome terminal is running in an amharic locale
and not specifying an explicit language when selecting fonts.  Fontconfig
uses the current locale to choose fonts unless the application provides an
explicit language hint.  So, the terminal should use only fonts which
support Ge'ez.  You might fix this by starting gnome-terminal with
another locale:

 	$ LC_CTYPE=en gnome-terminal

> More on fonts...  It seems GNOME has selected the ClearlyU font
> for showing me Ethiopic (though gnome-terminal indicates "Monospace" -?),
> this is a great choice!

Monospace is just an alias -- it actually points at a long list of fonts, 
one of those is selected based on the document language.

I also found several TrueType fonts for Ethiopic on the net; none of them
have copyrights allowing redistribution, so RH can't ship them, but they 
are an improvement over ClearlyU which is bitmap only.

	http://www.senamirmir.com/projects/ethiopic/ethiopic.html

has a pointer to the Ethiopia Jiret font in .zip format.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab