Re: Font priorities

[Stefan Baums <baums u washington edu>]

>  - Simply pick a font you like better in the GNOME font property
>    dialog, the fallback to the Arphic for Chinese characters
>    will still work.

In gnome-control-center, right?  I already had that idea, and set
the "Application Font" there to "Helvetica" instead of "Sans."
Unfortunately, that setting disappeared next time I restarted the
computer.  This is probably because I for various reasons use KDE
as my desktop environment, so gconf (or something) doesn't get
started, and the font settings not applied.  What to do in that
situation (running GNOME 2 apps under KDE)?  Is it possible or
advisable to start gconf manually in .Xsession?  (And would that
not, while fixing the font settings, interfere with KDE in other
ways, such as imposing its own background settings etc.?  It sure
does when I make changes in gnome-control-center inside a running
KDE environment.)

Back to the main point: while I - because I use Latin as my main
script - can change the font setting to e.g. "Helvetica" and still
get Chinese, those using mainly Chinese would seem to be stuck
with whatever ugly Latin glyphs their Chinese font contains,
because there is no way to set one's font preference for
_secondary_ scripts.  And apart from this, it still seems
undesirable that

   a) the look of the Latin script in the default font "Sans"
      varies from LC_CTYPE to LC_CTYPE (though I can sort of see
      your argument about glyphs from a single font in an ideal -
      though not this - world going best with each other), and

   b) in the case of LC_CTYPE=zh_X.Y, the Latin glyphs of the
      so-called "Sans" font aren't even sans-serif at all, because
      GTK+ wants to use whatever Latin glyphs it happens to find
      in the Chinese font (and those are not only ugly but
      seriffed).

In connection with Devanagari, you argued that basically
Latin-script fonts (like FreeSans) should not contain Devanagari
glyphs at all, but leave them to specialised Devanagari fonts.  I
agree completely.  And by the same token (looking from Chinese)
one should then say that basically Chinese fonts (like the Arphic
fonts) should not contain Latin glyphs, but leave them to
specialised Latin fonts.  So when real-world fonts fail to live up
to this ideal, I would suggest it should be
GTK+/Pango/Fontconfig's job to come to the rescue and _ignore_ the
glyphs in which a font is not specialised and that therefore can
be suspected to be less than optimal, and use instead glyphs from
an available font that _does_ specialise in those glyphs.

Best regards,
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Baums
Asian Languages and Literature
University of Washington