Re: Font priorities

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sat, 2003-02-08 at 12:48, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Eric Mader wrote:
> 
> > At 07:27 PM 2/4/2003, Stefan Baums wrote:
> > > [...] On the other hand, I guess Pango
> > >_could_ assemble the Arabic from presentation forms in the fonts
> > >available... but I'm not really Arabic.)
> > 
> > The way I handle this in the ICU LayoutEngine is with a canned GSUB table 
> > built from the Unicode character database. [...]
> 
> We somehow need to do this in Pango. There are widely-distributed fonts
> that have the presentation forms but not GSUB tables. For examples, see 
> below:
> 
> The situation is a little funny with people here that install a full Red
> Hat 8.0 system and then (after hearing that Red Hat 8.0 is Unicode-based)
> try typing Arabic in the default text editor without installing any font.
> They find that they can get Arabic but only disconnected letters...
> 
> The source of the problem was the font 'zysong.ttf' shipped as a part of
> Red Hat's 'ttfonts-zh_CN' package. It has glyphs for Arabic presentation
> forms but no GSUB tables. Unfortunately it was only licensed to Red Hat 
> and for distribution only, so I couldn't fix it for them...

The Arabic glyphs in that font are junk from my memory ... it would be
better to simply ignore the font for Arabic as not having a GSUB table
than to try and render with them.

The Tibetan glyphs are worse ... they are just done by transcribing
the pictures from the Unicode book, dotted circles and all.

(Unfortunately, people feel compelled to to make "Complete" GB18030
fonts, that contain Arabic, Tibetan, Mongolian, etc, in completely
unusable form.)

We'll be shipping the KACST Arabic fonts in the next version of 
Red Hat.

Regards,
                                          Owen