On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 01:31:24AM -0500, DJ Lucas wrote: > > On 08/12/2016 08:13 PM, Ken Moffat wrote: > > Now that I have updated my own website (linked from > > http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/x/xorg-config.html as > > the 'font-analysis' link at the end of "Xft Font Protocol" I would > > like to make some suggestions about how we handle fonts, as well as > > specific suggestions re the fonts used in kde5.
> > > > 2.2.2 A few linux-oriented fonts come in tarballs, but many others > > come in zip files - we should mention using unzip. And we should > > warn people th at some of them extract in to the current directory. > > Yes, general rule of thumb, always create a directory before using unzip. > And the 0.1 versions of UKai and UMing (0.2 was just repackaging). > > > > 2.2.3 There is a big problem if you create content and have a lot > > of fonts - it can take a long while to scroll through the list of > > available fonts (even if you only installed Noto-hinted, so many of > > those are separate fonts for different writing systems). Even > > ignoring the waste of space (in your backups), this makes the system > > unnecessarily hard to use (e.g. in libreoffice). > > Same thing for Gimp. :-) In my case, this was deliberate, however. Lots of > goofy fonts used for banners and what not. > Yes, the box where I only run releases and security updates has all the fonts and is painful. I'd forgotten that the same applied in Gimp - haven't added captions for about a year, and that gets done on a machine with far fewer fonts. > > > > 2.2.4 Therefore, we should mention that people may wish to remove > > certain fonts after trying them out, and then use fc-cache again. > > Perhaps we should also remind people to use fc-list to review w hat > > has been installed. > > Never used fc-list before. Output was several pages, about a quarter of my > 10,000 line screen buffer. :-) Sorry, I'm so used to using it that I forgot to mention piping it to less. Unfortunately, the output needs a certain amount of reformatting to be able to easily access font names or filenames. > > > > 3.1 I see little value in mentioning which fonts are the defaults > > for certain languages, because if you only have one font with the > > req uired glyph then that font will be used. Equally, the defaults > > DO change over time, and navigating through the conf files is less > > than obvious. > > There was some value in that at one time, or at least mentioning how to > force a non-default to the front of the line. I don't know if still the > same. > There is still value for people who have multiple fonts, or where fontconfig decides that a font lacks a "required" character and will not be suitable for the locale (found an account of that on google a few months ago). But we don't actually mention how to prefer a non-default font! And I have no experience of doing that. > > > 3.3 Firefly New Sung - the link has been dead for some time. When > > I looked at fonts about three years ago there was an updated version > > called OpenDesktop fonts although it was in an srpm (use rpm2cpio) > > and hard to find. Back in about April I found a current version at > > github, but when I looked a few days ago it had been deleted. > > Hmm, I thought New Sung was absorbed by Arphic something like 10 years ago. > I haven't installed them in a long time. I'm fairly certain that I have the > version mentioned later in this thread laying around someplace. The history, at least for those of us who don't read Traditional Chinese, is opaque. I've got the tarball I downloaded from github, but it crossed my mind that there might possibly be a legal issue. Also, from memory it was 22 MB which is a lot to host. OTOH, I liked the odohei (Sans) font it included. > > > > 3.5 Arphic fonts - link goes to UKai, I saw a comment a couple of > > hours ago that UMing are better for a Sans font - I do not agree, > > but they both seem to be popular with some Chinese users. > > I used both UKai/UMing from > http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/CJKUnifonts/Download for Chinese > coverage. Though I just now realized that I don't even have UMing installed. > :-/ I probably have a copy of Arphic still laying around if you want to > compare. > I think I've compared all of them on my own website (link at the top of the reply). I had thought I would change to using _one_ of the Noto Sans CJK fonts for urxvt, but I couldn't get them, nor wqy, to be big enough in urxvt - so I went back to UKai or UMing. > > > > 3.7 Baekmuk fonts - I like a couple of these, but fedora moved to > > Un-fonts several years ago under user pressure and I think > > fontconfig has been c hanged to prefer these. Nanum are also good. > > I also have carried Baekmuk > (https://kldp.net/baekmuk/release/865-baekmuk-ttf-2.2.tar.gz) for a long > time for Korean and these seem to be updated frequently enough. You are saying that is an update of the 2.2 version ? I'm confused, my own 2.2 dates from 2006 (that might be when I downloaded it, not sure). For Hangul (modern-korean syllables), unicode probably covered it all from when it was first included - it's only Han/Hanji which still gets new glyphs, and most of those are by-definition obscure. > > I still install Sazanami for Japanese at > http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.jp/efont/10087/sazanami-20040629.tar.bz2 but > these are obviously long in the tooth. A quick Google search has some love > for Takao as a replacement for the IPA fonts (this is what Ubuntu uses). > https://launchpad.net/takao-fonts > If I was only doing fonts, I'd take a look at takao. I think I looked at sazanami on my old website, but this time concentrated on what current distros are using / preferring. In a part I snipped, I think you said you don't see anything missing without kochi - that's because you have other Japanese fonts. > Take any or none of the above as I don't actually read any of these > languages. I have no idea if the rendered glyphs are even correct, but they > seem plausible. At least the "Learn Japanese" and "Learn Chinese > (Cantonese)" flash cards I ran across while trying to find links have text > that matches the images. For my need, it basically, it comes down to whether > I see any empty squares when I need to cross a web page in these languages, > and I don't see anything that strikes me as ugly, grainy, or with artifacts. > I'm in the same position as you. On one of the other korean fonts, I discovered that it renders a large part of Unified Han ("chinese/japanese style characters") as if they were Hangul, which is clearly odd, and for cyrillic I can detect that there are a couple of handwriting-style lowercase letters in Terminus-TTF, but otherwise for non-latin I tend to assume everything is probably correct. > AFAICT, I'm all good for my CJK coverage with just the above three and the > DE required ones. Also, Arabic, Hebrew, and Cyrillic seem to be covered with > the DE ones as well. I might not even need/use the three CJK ones I install > special as Noto seems to cover those as well. IDK, and that's all the reason > to add this page. Thanks for bringing it up. For RTL, FreeSerif seems to cover most things. I was going to say the same for DejaVu Sans, but looking at it just now I have realised it doesn't cover Pashto properly - I can see a couple of empty boxes in the PDF. > > > > 4.2 Noto Fonts. > > > > 4.2.1 I submit that installing all of Noto-hinted is a waste of > > space. Many of the fonts are for historical writing systems for > > which none of us will ever encounter computer text. If people are > > using these, they should try them and then remove those which are > > no use to them. > > > Have them all installed! A quick you don't need this, this, this, or that > would be very useful as these do take up some space. :-) > There are _so_many_ : probably a majority of them. There are also a lot of current scripts (e.g. cherokee, canadian aboriginal, many Tai variants) for which there seems little likelihood that most of us will ever see text (e.g. wikipedia will probably use pictures/images). Hmm, that amount of detail starts to sound like a page in itself. > > All of the above sounds good to me. Seems a place where we are lacking. I'd > also like a mention of some of those sub-directories. In packages that have > them, I copy the entire tree to it's own sub-directory, but I've no > recollection as to why. I just that I remember at some point somebody, > possibly you, or maybe Alexander, told me to do so (and I'm sure it was > explained why, but I just don't remember). > Probably Alexander - I guess it is an efficient way of putting fonts in a subdirectory (for fc-cache) without having to worry about what else might be shipped (docs, config files) whilst keeping them available in case wanted later. Thanks for the comments, I'll have to think a bit more about this. ĸen -- `I shall take my mountains', said Lu-Tze. `The climate will be good for them.' -- Small Gods -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
