Re: Say goodbye to core X fonts

[Edward Cherlin <cherlin pacbell net>]

On Wednesday 16 April 2003 01:05 am, Frederic Crozat wrote:
> Le mar 15/04/2003 à 07:59, Owen Taylor a écrit :
> > I'm just about ready to delete the pangox backend from the
> > HEAD branch of Pango.
> >
> > To reiterate the reasons:
> >
> >  - With Xft2, there is no good reason that anybody should
> > need to use core X fonts rather than Xft.
> >
> >    - Xft2 and current versions of FreeType can access bitmap
> >      fonts in BDF or PCF format.
>
> Well, currently, in Mdk 9.1, I have to disable Xft2 backend
> for the following locales otherwise we have really ugly
> rendering : el, ka, ar, ur, fa (we lack georgian, greek,
> arabic scalable fonts) and yi (the provided hebrew Type1 fonts
> are bugged, don't work in Xft)
>
> Are we sure we can have similar (or better) rendering with
> Xft2 backend ?
>
> I'm not a font/i18n specialist, so I cc: pablo, our Mdk i18n
> expert :))

I'm organizing a project to bring together all of the Free 
Software non-Latin font developers and raise some money to let 
them work full-time on a complete Unicode font set. We have been 
focusing on Indic and other complex Asian writing systems that 
aren't supported at all with any Unicode fonts, but we'll take a 
look at the entire range and see what else we need to fill in 
with Free fonts.

We will also look at the available non-Free fonts and see if we 
can get developers to make Free releases.

Let me know if you want to join the discussion and the work.
-- 
Edward Cherlin
Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more
"A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!"
--Alice in Wonderland