Re: improvement of font selection

[Kenichi Handa <handa m17n org>]

In article <Pine LNX 4 58 0603282139230 21945 epoch cs>, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu> writes:

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

I'll investigate it when I have more time.

> 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.

Then, my proposal is to improve Pango toward that missing
feature, isn't it?

>> 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.

But, those are all what a font can provide.

> 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.

Of course, it's users responsibility to order fonts properly
if he has multiple fonts supporting a specific script and he
prefer one to the other.  One may accept such a task for his
native script/language.  But, usually, for scripts/languages
that he is not native, he don't (and don't want to) care
about the quality.  Quality is of course somewhat important,
but the more important thing is that a text is rendered
correctly.

---
Kenichi Handa
handa m17n org