As should already be apparent, I *like* TTF/OTF fonts. But having too many causes pain when trying to select a specific font, e.g. in a writer document, so from time to time I add some fonts for a specific purpose, and then remove them again. And it appears that each noto variant is a separate font, i.e. it adds a new entry to the list of available fonts.
[ example : in a model-railway context, somebody was trying to replicate a particular Austrian station sign : I loaded a few blackletter fonts, reviewed them, produced a PDF and then deleted them ] I have installed the full set of noto fonts on my 7.9 kde4 build - definitely helps for wikipedia pages on some SE Asian languages (e.g. Burmese, and probably Yi, Tibetan, Mongolian - in the end I went back to one of my other systems and looked for languages which noto seemed to support (from the list of separate downloads) but which I cannot render (checking on wikipedia, discounting all non-current writing systems such as cuneiform and egyptian hieroglyphs). For most purposes, I'm not sure that I really care, but from time to time I follow links in wikipedia and get onto vaguely-related topics which end up with examples of scripts. So, my current feeling is that parts of noto might be useful - for some other languages the chance of finding any online usage, except for the unicode codepage, is so close to zero as to make no difference. Then I tried to find out exactly what upstream recommend. From https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/release-team/2015-October/009067.html | Ideally you'd be able to offer the Noto version(s) suitable for all | our languages so that a user who wants to use kde-l10n-ko can also | install noto-cjk-kr to get full korean support. So, technically we | want all the fonts. Unless kde-l10n-* is installed all the time we | don't need all the fonts installed all the time though. Noto Sans | and | Serif gives you all latin and greek script based typefaces thus | covers | generally everything that long enough was under european control to | adopt a latin or greek script as a national script (i.e. | EU/NA/SA/most | of SEA/most of Africa). | | Summary: | - Package Noto Sans and Serif to cover latin scripts to cover most | of | the world out of the box | - (Maybe package Noto Emoji as well because emojis are cool) | - Package other typefaces if you find them useful for your target | audience. If you don't you probably also shouldn't provide the | languages that use them though :P | - Unfortunately we have no list of scripts employed by our supported | languages at this time, maybe we should ask i18n to maintain one | moving forward? For me, what is interesting about Noto (apart from the fact I thought most of its scripts were only Sans - the fonts started out as Adobe's Source Sans Pro - and I did not notice any Serif aimed at latin, only Armenian, Georgian, and a few others) is that they are merely fonts. They are aimed to eventually cover all writing systems, but fontconfig ought to be able to mostly (i.e. for latin cyrillic and greek, and in a fashion for CJK) produce an alternative if they are not installed but other general-purpose fonts are (e.g. DejaVu covers most latin and cyrillic languages), and some of my machines use a "generic" (probably Chinese-style) CJK font. But Noto are indeed the default in plasma (strictly, not in KF5!) so for 7.9 I guess we should keep the link to all of them. However, and bearing in mind I have not yet build current KF5 or plasma, why do we need the oxygen fonts for KF5 ? https://plus.google.com/+KDEOKK/posts/LjDDMKPibg6 ¦ Plasma 5.5 will use Noto as the default fonts ¦ ¦ As you may be aware the Oxygen fonts are no longer actively ¦ maintained, so KDE VDG group made a decision to switch to Noto ¦ fonts. Unfortunately, the system where I installed Noto does not have gucharmap (no gtk3 in my kde4 builds), so I cannot look in detail at what noto contains, let alone build and install the KF5 oxygen fonts. For the moment my other current test system has booted fedora23 and is trying to build LFS to test some server packages - I say "trying" because most of the auditd messages from selinux look fatal, but let us see. In the future (7.10), I might make further suggestions about changing the fonts - but I need to see if fontconfig can now cope with Noto fonts for latex, and to analyse the individual fonts (each package is a subset, there is no one "covers everything" variant) - and that will need a *lot* of time. If I do make such suggestions, I think it will be important to remember user preference as well as upstream preference, and to perhaps give a list of known-usable fonts for different writing systems. ĸen -- This email was written using 100% recycled letters. -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
