Re: Medic needed for platform overview Pango screenshot

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

On Thu, 6 Apr 2006, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-04-06 at 19:43 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
>
> > The basic problem seems to be that it was done on a system
> > with few international fonts, so glyphs were pulled from
> > misc-fixed or similar and all the shaping features of Pango
> > didn't work.
>
> Do we need GNOME to recommend a certain set of fonts for distros to
> ship?  I.e. "we support languages Foo, Bar, Baz... and to get at least
> basic coverage that looks good, you should use fonts Blah, Bleh, Blih".

We can start a page on l.g.o, but it's really not an easy task.
For example DejaVu is out of question for reasons explained here:

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334758


Shaun, my comments:

  - The screenshot of gnumeric running under multiple locales
doesn't show much of the windows in the background.

  - Your very last sentence, that Vte users Pango and so supports
i18n, is not true for two reasons: 1) while vte does have a Pango
backend, the default (and fastest) backend uses Xft directly, and
2) it doesn't support i18n at all, not even nonspacing-mark
positioning (which xterm does IIRC), no bidirectional scripts, no
Arabic/Indic/... shaping.  Some of these are not even welldefined
in terminals, so it's not like it's lacking major features, just
that it's not really that important.


--behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill"
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