For a long while, our coverage of TTF fonts has been somewhat
limited and mostly referenced old fonts (for Latin languages,
DejaVu and GNU FreeFont were OK, but preferences and even required
codepoints (e.g. for Hong Kong) change.
If you think this post is long, wait until you see the new pages :-(
When I started to look at the details, it became clear to me that a
large part of which font will be used (unless a page supplies a WOFF
font, of course) is down to fontconfig - many of us only really
understand languages written in the Latin alphabet, and for that the
existing fontconfig settings are probably OK unless you had to
install non-libre fonts for some reason.
I can just-about sound-read (slowly) the Cyrillic or Greek alphabets
on a good day, but fonts for those those mostly work equally well
with the latin fonts. For other users, things may be harder. We
have had some CJK font details for many years, so I have updated
those and ignored other writing systems (although fonts for them are
covered at my own website, which has been linked from the fonts
section for a few years).
The main part of my changes (I want to deal properly with the Oxygen
and Noto fonts after this part is in the book) are now rendered at
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~ken/blfs-book-fonts/ - I've done
both flavours of the book, but all the changes apply to both the
sysv and systemd versions.
I have not added any new _versioned_ packages to the book, so no
monitoring for new versions : when a font is good enough for general
use a new version will probably bring minor improvements, but not
enough to care about - if you build manually, just download the
current version, or if you use scripts then check for new versions
every few months.
A summary of my changes follows :
===============================
fontconfig - add ~/.local/share/fonts to where it searches, and note
that ~/.fonts is deprecated but still works.
x/installing - add new pages for 'Tuning Fontconfig' and 'TTF and
OTF fonts' between the config page and the legacy fonts.
Tuning Fontconfig
-----------------
For the user notes, share the existing fontconfig page.
My opinion is that people who wish to change some fontconfig
settings will never think about that until they have some TTF fonts
installed, so I have put this large page into the X chapter.
Some of the Xft text is moved to this page. I deleted Alexander's
old comment about KOI8-R becauise people use UTF-8 nowadays.
I then show some exaples of useful commands - the aim of the page is
to give people enough information to be able to try changing things.
Following that I list what the various file numbers are for (it is
in the fontconfig user docs, but this is an attempt to keep it in a
handy place).
I then explain how fonts are chosen, how to change hinting and
aliasing with a commented file which shows the defaults, how to
disable bitmap fonts (less important now that we do not install
them by default), how to add extra font directories not in
/usr/share/fonts (for texlive), a selection of ways to prefer
specific fonts (including fixing some CJK issue, at least for those
of us not in CJK locales), how to fix up the old conf files shipped
with some CJK fonts, and why most users not in a CJK locale will
probably not wish to do that.
At the end of the page I have a link to a useful series of blog
entries about fontconfig, and to the Arch and Gentoo wiki pages.
TTF and OTF fonts :
-------------------
(no page for user notes)
Retain a little of the text from Xft about poor Unicode coverage.
Give general details and then look first at Latin fonts (in
alphabetical order, including metric equivalents for some common
fonts, also Cantarell, DejaVu, fonts for KDE (see below), GNU
Freefont, the old MS Core fonts (my complements to Armin for
making me aware that Arch have an easier way of extracting these).
For the fonts used by KDE (oxygen, Noto) I intend to move the
essential items from the current pages into the TTF and OTF page,
but I will do that (with a major simplification) after this first
part goes in. For this stage they are just summarised here.
After the latin fonts, I look at CJK:
For Chinese, suggest that those of us who only want to get the text
to render will probably not want to install Kai fonts. For the
moment, retain text for fireflysung and UKai, but commented. Add
Opendesktop-fonts-1.4.2 (from Arch - a less-old version of
fireflysung), Noto Sans CJK [ a separate download link from the
bulk of Noto Sans ], retain UMing, add WenQuanYi Zen Hei (a Chinese
Sans font).
For Japanese, mention IPAex, Kochi, VL Gothic.
For Korean, fontconfig now prefers Nanum and Un fonts to Baekmuk
because that was what users preferred. I was going to link to each,
but my link for Nanum gave me a permissions error when I tested this
part of the page, so in the end I linked to freekoreanfont.com (and
from there only people who can read Korean will be able to download
Nanum, so I'm going to use UnBatang). My direct link
http://cdn.naver.com/naver/NanumFont/fontfiles/NanumFont_TTF_ALL.zip
seems to be working again now, but too late! Working links for all
of these at my zarniwhoop.uk website, but I suspect the different
Korean fonts are a minority interest for us. The WenQuanYi Zen Hei
font also covers Korean.
Other changes
-------------
abiword - link to the DejaVu fonts subsection.
ImageMagick (6 and 7) - link to the DejaVu fonts subsection, and
link is moved into a "within the book" position.
pango - link to the Cantarell fonts subsection.
paps - link to the DejaVu fonts subsection and suggest some of the
Chines fonts and Japanese fonts instead of mentioning Arphic and
Kochi (this is for visual comparison of a png file).
xterm - link to the DejaVu fonts subsection.
ACTION REQUIRED :
Please object if you think any of this is *wrong* (for 'inadequate'
the details can be corrected if they need to be), otherwise I will
go ahead and do this.
