Re: Fonts for distribution

[Simos Xenitellis <simos74 gmx net>]

O/H Gudmund Areskoug ÎÎÏÎÏÎ:
> Hi,
>
> Danilo Åegan wrote:
>   
> > 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.
> >     
>
> thinking:
> - What happens if there's no single font that fits, when language X
> turns up?
>   
If there is no font for a specific glyph, GTK+ shows a square that 
contains the unique code of the letter missing.
Thanks to the Unicode standard, each letter has a unique code. So, if 
letter A is missing from all fonts (unlikely), it would be shown similar to
----
|0 0|
|4 1|
----
In some cases it is shown as an empty rectangle. I think it depends on 
the GTK+ version.
> - If the fonts are free and not platform specific, might they not be
> made to cater for other (even inferior) platforms too?
>
> I've seen rather a lot of messages in other fora lately from or about
> people not being able to read this, see that, "I only see ????" - and
> the occasional "...it shows fine in MSOE/MSIE/MSWord etc., why can't
> these open source guys just make it work too?" and worse. Once in a
> while there's the "how did you write that character? - I can see it but
> not write it!".
>   
A free Linux distribution can only distribute free (as in freedom) 
fonts. If such free (as in freedom) font exist
but are not in your distribution, one has to make the effort to add.

> So my take on the font issue is that there should exist at least one
> catch-all font that can be used on any platform, and where possible be
> used only when truly fit, or as a last resort.
>   
There is such a catch-all font, FreeFont, which has quite a good support 
for glyphs.
There are some peculiar scripts that there is no free font yet, that 
Code 2001 (google for this)
can cater for. However, Code 2001 is shareware.
In addition, a new font, Stixfonts (www.stixfonts.org), to be released soon
with a semi-free licence will add amazing support that not Win nor OS/X 
have.

All in all, most of the issues encountered are configuration issues; 
making sure
that free fonts are included by default in distributions. Or, people 
have fonts which are good,
however they did not specify a free license so they may need to be 
contacted on this.

As a final comment, for end-users to be able to read/write in their 
language,
there is need for work to test your prefered distribution that no 
glitches are present.
There are always minor issues about things that do not work, that are 
easy to fix before the release.
Currently, Ubuntu 6.04 is under testing for an April release, as well as 
with OpenSUSE 10.1 and Fedora Core 5.

Simos