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)

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 developping 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 not 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.

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

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

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)