LANGUAGE tag for fonts

[Justin B Rye]

Benjamin Mesing wrote:
>>     Font::Language::<lang1> <lang2>
>> 
>> Pleas can you provide such tag?
> 
> My first idea was that your search should be covered by a search for
> e.g.
> 	culture::turkish and made-of::data:font
> 
> However, this currently gives an empty result set :-(

Come to that the same is true for French.  Ordinary fonts seem to
cover most of the Latin charactersets by default these days, so
if we use this approach it's going to be a horror to maintain.  For
instance, do we know if ttf-opensymbol supports Welsh (Latin-8)?

> A full text search for "font and turkish" produces the following
> packages:
>       * emacs-intl-fonts
>       * console-terminus
>       * ttf-bitstream-vera
>       * language-env
> 
> I considered, that the first three should be tagged culture::turkish.
> However, it would lead to all ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-15 fonts to be
> tagged culture::{dutch,finish,german,...} which seems somehow wrong.

Obviously, we aren't really trying to match up fonts with cultures
here (that would be ludicrous: "I'm a Roman Catholic so I want Times
Roman").  Strictly speaking it's not a matter of "LANGUAGE", either,
although when people say they want to be able to use Turkish, we can
assume they don't mean that they're going to write it in Elvish
Tengwar, they mean they want to use the standard writing system
associated with tr_TR, and therefore that they need fonts that cover
the Latin-5 characterset.

(And watch out for odd cases like culture::taiwanese, which I assume
really means the zh_TW locale.  That's Mandarin Chinese in
traditional characters - not to be confused with Taiwanese, which is
a separate Sino-Tibetan language.)

We could try doing it by having tags directly for charactersets, but
can we expect users to know which one they're after?  Even the
font-package maintainers never seem to put this sort of information
in package-descriptions.  Maybe if we went by ISO-15924 scripts?
-- 
JBR
Ankh kak! (Ancient Egyptian blessing)