Re: Fonts for distribution

[Gudmund Areskoug <gudmundpublic gmail com>]

Hi,

Danilo Šegan wrote:
> Hi Clytie,
> Today at 5:29, Clytie Siddall wrote:
>> I have specialist fonts for Vietnamese, and for some other languages,
>> but I only use them when I'm preparing documents for print. Ludida
>> Grande does an excellent job of my language, and of many others. So I
>> wanted the same convenience for users of our distributions,
>> especially those who may not know how to install or setup specialist
>> fonts.
> 
> The thing is that fontconfig, that underlies our font selection
> system, is way more advanced.
> 
> You wouldn't have to "select" any font: if your current font is unable
> to display Vietnamese, fontconfig will select the first one that can.
> If you have a font-per-script, you can set the best font for any
> script, thus you would be getting better results without any more work!
> 
> Of course, it gives suboptimal results if fonts contain parts of a 
> script, but not the full script, so you get a mess of characters from
> different fonts.

thinking:
- What happens if there's no single font that fits, when language X
turns up?
- If the fonts are free and not platform specific, might they not be
made to cater for other (even inferior) platforms too?

I've seen rather a lot of messages in other fora lately from or about
people not being able to read this, see that, "I only see ????" - and
the occasional "...it shows fine in MSOE/MSIE/MSWord etc., why can't
these open source guys just make it work too?" and worse. Once in a
while there's the "how did you write that character? - I can see it but
not write it!".

So my take on the font issue is that there should exist at least one
catch-all font that can be used on any platform, and where possible be
used only when truly fit, or as a last resort.

Other than that, I agree with Behdad.

BR,
Gudmund