Re: Medic needed for platform overview Pango screenshot

[Simos Xenitellis <simos74 gmx net>]

On Thu, 2006-04-06 at 21:29 -0500, 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".

If someone from these lists who reads this can do it, this would be
great.
The work would be an issue of selecting fonts to achieve a good coverage
of languages but also setup an appropriate /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file
(see:
http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/fontconfig/fontconfig/fonts.conf.in?view=markup).
As a starting point, one can see the collection of fonts in Ubuntu which
I believe it quite good.

The fonts.conf file requires some magic with the configuration so that
bad fonts get blacklisted properly (for example, CJK fonts blacklisted
for Greek and FreeFont blacklisted for CJK). Behdad showed how this can
be achieved in a recent thread.

There is an important issue with the font of choice for
Latin/Greek/Cyrillic (LGC) as it covers languages in
America(North/South), Europe, parts of Africa and Asia. As text would be
commonly found having parts in any of these languages, it would be nice
to focus on a single font, if possible.
DejaVu is such a candidate for LGC, and as far as I know it's one of the
few (only?) active FLOSS font development projects. There is work now to
complete the hinting for Greek and Cyrillic, so that characters do not
look fuzzy.

There are quite a few free fonts available, that unfortunately are not
hinted.

I believe a page under 
http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2ffontconfig
would be good to discuss this.

Simos