Re: localised font resources

[Raph Levien <raph acm org>]

Sergey I. Panov wrote:
> 
> Is it planned to have "locale" dependent font resources?
> Are we really stuck with changing gtkrc file(s) along with changing
> locale. (I include my gtkrc_ru file in gtkrc whenever I am switching
> to "ru" locale -- this is the only way to use I know to change fonts
> ISO8859-1 encoding fonts to those in KOI8-R encoding)

No, I think the true goal is to have a unicode based font system with
font lists so that multiple fonts can be used to cover larger parts of
the unicode space.

I'm presently working quite actively on a high quality unicode-based
text formatter in the gnome-print module. It's a moderately heavyweight
approach, but my personal feeling is that the weight is worth paying
for. My personal feeling is that it's better to simplify apps so they
deal with text in a very simple unicode way, with deep support
underneath to make it all work, than to have a simpler charset-based
infrastructure and make each app carry some of the responsibility for
dealing with charsets, font configuration, and so on.

Incidentally, Russian is a really easy language to deal with, as
languages go. Hebrew is a little harder because of the bidirectionality.
Arabic is harder because of bidi and a fairly complex ligature structure
(plus tatweels for stretching words so they justify). Devanagari becomes
_really_ difficult because of the ligatures, the reordering of vowels
within syllable clusters, and superscript/subscript positioning of some
elements (the "ra" consonant). Mongolian is probably the hardest because
it requires vertical layout.

Raph