Re: Fonts for distribution

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Åegan)]

Hi Clytie,

Today at 5:29, Clytie Siddall wrote:

> I have specialist fonts for Vietnamese, and for some other languages,
> but I only use them when I'm preparing documents for print. Ludida
> Grande does an excellent job of my language, and of many others. So I
> wanted the same convenience for users of our distributions,
> especially those who may not know how to install or setup specialist
> fonts.

The thing is that fontconfig, that underlies our font selection
system, is way more advanced.

You wouldn't have to "select" any font: if your current font is unable
to display Vietnamese, fontconfig will select the first one that can.
If you have a font-per-script, you can set the best font for any
script, thus you would be getting better results without any more work!

Of course, it gives suboptimal results if fonts contain parts of a 
script, but not the full script, so you get a mess of characters from
different fonts.

> I really think, for most users, having a general-purpose font
> installed with the distro, which will handle a large range of glyphs,
> will make our translations more accessible. People still have the
> option of using other fonts, and our translations aren't restricted
> by the user's skill-level in managing fonts.

In some areas, we are way ahead of most proprietary solutions :)

Maybe MacOS/X does some things better, but lets not forget that there
are things we do better as well (such as this one: fontconfig is
clearly a superiour solution).  At least for anyone for whom freedom
itself is not enough.

Fontconfig would allow free software distributors to ship only limited
font-per-script setups which would give excellent results for
everybody.

Cheers,
Danilo