Talk:Fonts

This is the area for dicsussions of the Fonts page.

Not complete

I did the font list. The list is probably not complete! --Bz 15:54, 17 June 2006 (EDT)

I did another font list. It is also seriously incomplete, but perhaps I'll have time to remedy that. --Mokurai 20:10, 3 November 2006 (EST)

Well, I got the Debian Non-Latin Truetype fonts covered. That will do for the moment.--Mokurai 06:33, 28 November 2006 (EST)

The font classifications are not correct in places. Sinhala is geographically South Asian, not South East Asian, and the script itself is Indic, like Tamil and the others. Many of the South East Asian scripts are Indic in their origin, in that they are ultimately derived from Brahmi and have histories that link them to Southern Indian scripts (e.g. Thai, Burmese). The organization should be reconsidered in this light.

Discussion

The following paragraph was moved here from the Font Common Room page. It refers to the section that talks about fontconfig (sans, serif, monospace), etc.

This entire discussion seems to be ignorant of the development work that has been done, outside of the Linux community, in developing Unicode fonts. The prime example is Gentium which covers most of the scripts needed. Any work in improving coverage should add glyphs to existing Unicode fonts like Gentium. Also, please note that concepts such as sans, serif and monospace do not exist at all in many of the world's scripts. Most scripts also do not have upper/lower case distinctions.

A contrary view: It is essential that we have, in profusion, fonts that are typographically correct for one writing system, and indeed for one application in one language in one country, regardless of the standards that may apply to any other combination. Furthermore, it has become impossible to build complete Unicode fonts, with more than 100,000 characters in Unicode 5.0. TrueType fonts are limited to 64K glyphs.

Anyway, Gentium only covers Latin, IPA, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic.

Fortunately, operating systems are gradually getting better heuristics for mapping multiple fonts to cover the fill range of characters needed in multilingual documents, particularly for languages that use characters from more than one Unicode character block, such as Kurdish (Cyrillic with two Latin letters) or APL. Or for that matter, any language that needs characters from Basic Latin, Latin-1, and either of the Extended Latin blocks; or Basic Arabic and Arabic Extended, or any other such combination.

Please spend your time constructively in enhancing the page to properly cover non-Latin scripts. Simosx 14:51, 1 June 2006 (EDT)

Gentium is a well-known free font, licensed with the Open Font License. It is a Serif font that covers the full Latin Unicode block, which means it supports sufficiently Brazil and Nigeria. I do not know whether Gentium is hinted, which might be an issue when used for the User Interface. Simosx 15:00, 1 June 2006 (EDT)

Additional fonts can be used by developers by converting font outlines to SVG format and using the SVG support in the OLPC to display them. It is a nice thing to have some font variety however, it is more important to have one font that covers all the glyphs used in the target languages. User:Memracom

Are there any references to the SVG support in the OLPC? If fontconfig is not used, then indeed, you need one big font will all the glyphs. There is an issue here that some Asian fonts do not allow to modify them. Make sure the font allows modification. With a system like fontconfig, you can virtually join two fonts under the same name though you do not alter the files. Simosx 15:51, 1 June 2006 (EDT)

This statement is confusing. In many of the world's scripts, the terms sans, serif and monospace are meaningless. Most scripts also do not make a distinction between upper and lower case. For the educational use which the OLPC targets, we could be successful with only a single Unicode font that covers all languages such as the Gentium font. User:Memracom

Gentium comes nowhere near covering all languages. "Gentium is a typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin script to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode." --Mokurai 22:34, 3 November 2006 (EST)

I added the principal writing systems, with at least one link to a Unicode font page for each. We still need to go through and identify which fonts are Free/Open Source (no charge, permission to modify), which are shareware (no charge, but cannot modify and distribute), and which require a commercial license to distribute. We also need to get typographically savvy users from the target countries to evaluate the quality of these fonts and their appropriateness for particular languages. Ed Cherlin 20061010 00:29 GMT-07:00

I added a list of Free TrueType and OpenType fonts in Debian Linux. --Mokurai 22:34, 3 November 2006 (EST)

Work in progress

Below are some fragments that may make it in the front page.

Scripts in Pilot Countries

Brazil	China	India	Nigeria	Thailand
Latin	Tibetan བོད་ཡིག, Simplified chinese 简体字	Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Limbu, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Syloti Nagri, , Tamil, Telugu	Pannigerian	Thai

Important issues to figure out

• Is there a requirement for the font to be hinted?

It appears the font that is used for the UI should be hinted; At 800x600 screen resolution, font will look bad if not hinted. --Simosx 15:14, 17 June 2006 (EDT)

• We still do not know if there is a requirement for fontconfig. This should probably come out soon.
• We do not know if there will be a requirement for the applications to be based on GTK+ 2.x/Pango
• Is there a requirement for the font system to support localised glyphs? (when languages share a unicode glyph but disagree on its drawing conventions, transparently select the variant needed for the language used. example : arabic vs farsi)

This functionality (locl support) is not available yet in fontconfig/pango. There is a discussion on these issues at the fontconfig mailing list. --Simosx 15:14, 17 June 2006 (EDT)

• Is there a requirement for the font pack and shaper to be the same on all OLPC systems or can they vary from country to country (same: better i18n, easier to manage - but may be impossible without some work on the font libraries; different: leaner systems, but not interoperable, simple font tech)

As far as I understand, each country can choose and pick the basic font of the system. Pango/fontconfig support well most languages. For example, a Persian OLPC would use Persian fonts alleviating the issue of localised glyph support. --Simosx 15:14, 17 June 2006 (EDT)

• How/when can font be updated (important for fonts which are a work in progress - if the font selection is frozen for a long time, the state it's frozen in must be carefully selected)
• add here

The main text has the following in it:

Scripts in Pilot Countries

Not to have included a font, for normal means that the laptop is not usable for the kids in the area the script is used.

This is not a grammatical English sentence. What does it mean? What is the meaning of the list that follows the statement? Is it a good thing or a bad thing if a language is listed in the list?

The quoted sentence requires rephrasing. See main document for a clarification (I am not sure who wrote the original). Simosx 17:36, 1 June 2006 (EDT)

How many fonts?

"For other scripts, these three faces do not apply, therefore only one font is required."

This turns out not to be the case. Each writing system, indeed each country and language that uses each writing system, may have its own typographic requirements and its own font categories. There is as much need for ten thousand fonts in Hindi or Swahili as there is in English.

Many other languages have adopted Western typographical conventions, or have adapted them to fit with their previous practice. Thus there are Chinese, Korean, and Japanese "serif" Ming/Myeong/Mincho brush fonts and modern "Gothic" fonts, in addition to informal rough/grass fonts, seal fonts, bronze fonts, oracle bone fonts, and many others. It is true that there is no separate monospace category for these three languages. Kufic Arabic script plays a role somewhat analogous to san-serif/Gothic. For Gujarati, the Aakar font is an example of modern san-serif, while Rekha has very clear serifs.

--Mokurai 20:09, 3 November 2006 (EST)