Re: improvement of font selection

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Kenichi Handa wrote:

> Thank you.  That worked.

Great.  Still something's wrong that you are not seeing lang=si
passed to fontconfig.  No idea what.


> >> but I think it's a big pain to list up all such fonts
> >> for many languages.
>
> > Well, yes, it's a big pain when people stuff (crappy) glyphs for
> > lots of different scripts in a font.
>
> I still think that the source of the pain is in
> inappropriate font selection mechanism.  It is a renderer's
> responsibility to choose a proper font as far as it is going
> to do some automatic font selection.

Apart from not checking the available OpenType tables in the
font, Pango is handling the rest already.  It's a bug when it's
not doing, and the OpenType table thing is a known missing
feature.


> The fonts provide sufficient information; i.e. which glyphs
> are available, which OpenType tables are available, which
> features for which scripts are available.  As far as that
> information is correct, how can we blame them?

That's not enough.  An ugly font if as good as a beautiful font
as far as these metrics are concerned.  If you have ten fonts,
each having glyphs for ten scripts, with varying degrees of
quality and aesthetics, you have to manually order then in your
fonts.conf for each script, cause they cannot be ordered
independent of the script you are interested in.  Whether A is
better than B depends on which script you are interested in,
while if your fonts each had glyphs for a single script, you
could easily compare every two fonts and say either 1) A is
better than B, 2) B is better than A, 3) they don't compare,
because they have glyphs for different scripts.  This way, the
only thing you need to handle in fonts.conf is to order fonts of
each script, and handle the differences between preferred fonts
of languages using the same script.

> ---
> Kenichi Handa
> handa m17n org

--behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill"
	-- Dan Bern, "New American Language"