Re: Medic needed for platform overview Pango screenshot

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 00:12 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> 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.

Well, if I put them side-by-side, the screenshot
would get rather wide.  I try to stay inside of
600 pixels, and fewer is better.

Plus, there's really nothing very interesting in
those windows: just icons on toolbars and a grid,
which look the same in every language.

>   - 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.

Huh.  And this is exactly why every document we
produce should go through technical reviews by
the developers of the covered material.

I generally have no problems looking at po files
in the terminal (which I do often, for various
esoteric reasons I still don't fathom myself).
But then, I probably wouldn't recognize problems
with Arabic unless they were really egregious.

--
Shaun