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

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 8:52 AM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
> It may make sense to allow setting of the font as well. While the
> default "Sans" may be good enough for most European scripts, it may
> cause problems for Arabic, Asian, South Asian scripts, etc. "Sans"
> usually resolves to DejaVu Sans, etc, which often carry suboptimal
> glyphs from non Latin scripts (to serve as a worst case fallback if
> nothing else is available). This can be worked around with clever
> fontconfig rules, but that would be painful to do for each and every
> script out there, and it might be useful to allow the user to choose
> the font-face along with the size.

Painful, but I'd argue that this is a necessary part of making a
properly localized build.  As discussed in another thread recently,
it's very confusing to have a plethora of fonts available all with
overlapping codesets.  Better would be to put in the work to make at
least the basic "Sans" font (and maybe "Serif" as well) have good
coverage of unicode via fontconfig.

This is a separate issue from "whether the font control panel should
allow you to change the system font".  I'd say that the font control
panel *should* let you customize the font, just because it's fun.
I've made similar arguments before about the home screen, colors, etc,
etc.  It's fun, and it lets kids make the computers their own.
  --scott

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