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

[Albert Cahalan]

Sayamindu Dasgupta writes:

> 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

I think it's only fair that you get suboptimal glyphs too. :-)

DejaVu Sans looks bad even for English with plain ASCII. Among other
things, somebody invented a screwy non-standard way to distinguish the
lowercase L ("l") character. That sort of "innovation" just isn't what
you do in a system-wide default font. The rest is messed up too.

BTW, consider a document containing several languages. You'd normally
want all the Latin-based ones to use one font, all the Cyrillic ones to
use one font, and so on. In other words, per-script (not per-language)
selection of the font. If I remember right, there are about 14 scripts
in active use around the world.