[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Control Panel Font configuration

[Albert Cahalan]

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 4:19 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 3:31 PM, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 2:50 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Really, the problems described here can all be solved by careful font
>>> selection and configuration.  Fontconfig allows 'virtual fonts' which
>>> can combine the best parts of a number of font files.
>>
>> Please explain how this solves the problem of having
>> multiple fonts in the GUI that all look the same to a
>> single-language user.
>>
>> (for example, 100 fonts with foreign-sounding names
>> that all look **exactly** like DejaVu Sans)
>
> You should configure fontconfig to only show *one* "Sans" font which
> includes the relevant parts of all these other script-specific fonts
> for the appropriate unicode ranges.

I don't think "Sans" should pretend to be a font.
The GUI should have the correct font name.

> Fonts which map script-specific
> differences which do not have a roman-script equivalent should either
> be given names which make this clear (made up example: "Sans (North
> Korea)", "Sans (South Korea)") and/or omitted from deployments

This is unsatisfying and/or troublesome.

Last I looked (which was some time ago) there were
about 20 Arabic fonts in the standard OS builds.
They all looked **exactly** like DejaVu Sans.

What if I do want multi-script text? If I can't pick a
distinct font for each script, then I have to change
fonts all over the document. (assuming I'm not happy
with the default pairing)