[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#862276: fonts-noto-cjk: I recommend spliting fonts-noto-cjk to make it become targeted and flexible

[Gregor Riepl]

Hi,

> I am a debian user and frome china mainland.Baeutiful fonts are too less in
> debian.But noto font is a good choice.However I find noto fonts are too large
> in debian software repository,more than 100MB.And I find it include Simplified
> Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean and Japanese. But as a chinese, I
> hardlyever use Korean and Japanese.I believe most Korean and Japanese also need
> native language only.I suggest spliting this package named fonts-noto-cjk,and
> seperate package Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
> It can reduce the package size,and more targeted, flexible, according to the
> need to install the required fonts.

I'm not sure if splitting up the .ttc files would reduce their size significantly.

As you may know, these languages share a good deal of common glyphs, at least
as far as the standardised character sets go.

For example, while the character 气 has a different Simplified Chinese,
Traditional Chinese and Japanese form, others like 木 are exactly the same.
So, if you cut off the language (or region) specific characters, you would end
up with a somewhat smaller file, but not by much, since the resulting fonts
would still have to contain the shared glyphs. And if you (for whatever
reason) need the complete CJK set, you would have to install fonts with
significant overlap.

The only benefit may possibly come from splitting off the Hangeul set, but I
wonder if it's really worth the effort.

Perhaps it may make more sense to separate the different font styles.

Best regards,
Greg