[Debian-in-workers] Question about Sans/Serif aliases

[Soumyadip Modak]

On 8/28/07, Arne Goetje <arne.goetje at canonical.com> wrote:
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> Hi all,
>
> please CC to me, I'm not on the list.
>
> I'm in charge of i18n support in Ubuntu.
> As I'm going to repackage the ttf-indic-fonts packages, I want to make
> sure that the fontconfig settings are correct.
>
> I'm repackaging the fonts to split the packages into a -core and an
> - -extra packages, the -core packages only contain the minimum required
> fonts for the Live CD, while the -extra packages contain the remaining
> fonts.

We had thought of a similar approach long ago (when we were merging
ttf-indic-fonts with other similar packages like ttf-bengali-fonts and
ttf-tamil-fonts, see changelog) but it was decided then to go forward
with the structure present now. Jaldhar, can you please weigh in ?

> Now, I examined that of these the following fonts are the only serif
> (modulated) ones:
> Rekha, Kedage_n, Rachana, TAMU_Kalyani and Pothana2000.
> All other fonts are actually sans-serif (unmodulated) ones.
>
> Some of the serif fonts surprisingly use sans-serif Latin glyphs, however...
>
> 1. is there a reason, why Rekha, Kedage_n, Rachana, TAMU_Kalyani and
> Pothana2000 are actually advertised as sans-serif and that all fonts
> advertised as serif are actually sans-serif? Even with serif fonts
> available for most scripts?

I believe that the concept of Serif/Sans serif fonts doesn't really
apply to Indic scripts. Font developers/maintainers will be able to
better comment on this. However if English glyphs are taken into
account, then I must say I've so far relied on the information that
fontforge spits out to decide where each font goes in.

> 2. How well are these fonts maintained? I have seen that some fonts have
> changed drastically between 0.4.9 and 0.5.0, some losing a lot of
> precomposed ligature glyphs. I've also seen that there is a attempt to
> get Malayalam script into DejaVu Sans. Do you know anything about that?
> Is there any planning on future font/script coverage?

Most of the fonts don't see any major changes. Malayalam however seems
to be a problem area, since IIRC a lot of fonts have come in and gone
out, with the major Malayalam contributors unable to come to a
consensus. This comment should be taken as a personal opinion of a
person who has been contributing to the ttf-indic-fonts package for
some time, but doesn't know much about Malayalam. VivekVC and Mahesh
Pai, among others, are in a better position to answer questions on
Malayalam.

> 3. Have you tested the fontconfig lang tag? Does it actually work for
> you, that with an indic locale the specified fonts get selected for sans
> / serif? I tried to boot Ubuntu into Bengali, but the specified fonts
> were not selected in sans / serif... any test results on this?

We have added fontconfig config files, but I personally haven't had a
chance to test the packages on my system. Kartik, Jaldhar ?

> Cheers
> Arne

IIRC, ttf-freefonts also has glyphs of various Indic fonts
incorporated quite recently. If it is a question of having a basic set
of Indic fonts available on a default system installation, I believe
ttf-freefonts already addresses the issue.

-- 
Soumyadip Modak
soumyadip.modak at gmail.com
soumyadip at ubuntu-in.org
http://soumyadip.freemind.in/blog