Hello,
the following TrueType fonts are present on the LFS Live CD
(utf8-newmake branch):
bkai00mp.ttf DejaVuSerif-Oblique.ttf luximri.ttf
bsmi00lp.ttf DejaVuSerif-Roman.ttf luximr.ttf
DejaVuSans-BoldOblique.ttf FreeMonoBoldOblique.ttf luxirbi.ttf
DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf FreeMonoBold.ttf luxirb.ttf
DejaVuSansCondensed-BoldOblique.ttf FreeMonoOblique.ttf luxirri.ttf
DejaVuSansCondensed-Bold.ttf FreeMono.ttf luxirr.ttf
DejaVuSansCondensed-Oblique.ttf FreeSansBoldOblique.ttf luxisbi.ttf
DejaVuSansCondensed.ttf FreeSansBold.ttf luxisb.ttf
DejaVuSansMono-BoldOb.ttf FreeSansOblique.ttf luxisri.ttf
DejaVuSansMono-Bold.ttf FreeSans.ttf luxisr.ttf
DejaVuSansMono-Oblique.ttf FreeSerifBoldItalic.ttf VeraBd.ttf
DejaVuSansMono-Roman.ttf FreeSerifBold.ttf VeraBI.ttf
DejaVuSans-Oblique.ttf FreeSerifItalic.ttf VeraIt.ttf
DejaVuSans.ttf FreeSerif.ttf VeraMoBd.ttf
DejaVuSerif-BoldOblique.ttf gbsn00lp.ttf VeraMoBI.ttf
DejaVuSerif-Bold.ttf gkai00mp.ttf VeraMoIt.ttf
DejaVuSerifCondensed-BoldOblique.ttf kochi-gothic-subst.ttf VeraMono.ttf
DejaVuSerifCondensed-Bold.ttf kochi-mincho-subst.ttf VeraSeBd.ttf
DejaVuSerifCondensed-Oblique.ttf luximbi.ttf VeraSe.ttf
DejaVuSerifCondensed.ttf luximb.ttf Vera.ttf
All Type1 fonts that come with Xorg are removed. The version of DejaVu
fonts is 1.14. The contents of /etc/fonts/fonts.conf is the same as in
the unmodified Fontconfig-2.3.2, with the following exception: the
string "Bitstream Vera" is globally replaced with "DejaVu".
This font setup works perfectly with xterm in Xft mode when the font is
set to Monospace (aka xterm -lc -fa Monospace -fs 12). For locales where
DejaVu Sans Mono contains all characters of the national alphabet, it is
used. For el_GR and el_GR.UTF-8 (where DejaVu doesn't contain all the
Greek characters), FreeMono is automatically used instead, and no
characters (even no English characters) are taken from DejaVu Sans Mono.
In the similar way, Arphic fonts are used for Chinese and Kochi fonts
for Japanese. That's good, because all characters (both Latin and
national) are rendered in a consistent fashion. Moreover, xterm accepts
font size in points, not pixels, thus the described setup works for all
screen resolutions. This fits nicely with the principle that any need to
configure anything except the LANG variable and the timezone after
booting from the LiveCD is a bug.
I think that such behaviour is by good design. Thanks to Fontconfig
developers for their good work.
However, due to better integration with Xfce and better support for
GTK-based input method editors (such as SCIM), I decided to install
(VTE-based) Xfce Terminal as a terminal emulator on this CD.
Unfortunately, this brings a lot of font-related problems due a very bad
font matching algorithm implemented in the file src/vtexft.c in VTE
sources, function _vte_xft_font_for_char(). This basically chooses the
first font that contains a given character, and doesn't look at the
locale and its orthography at all. Thus, it happily picks (even in Greek
locales!) Greek letters π and Ω from DejaVu Sans Mono and other Greek
letters from some other random fonts like Arphic ones (and they also
don't fully cover Greek orthography) instead of consistently using
FreeMono. I think it is a design bug in VTE, fonts that don't contain
the full character range commonly used in the language implied by the
locale should be either completely rejected or used only as a last resort.
Question to VTE developers: are there any plans to fix this? (please CC:
[email protected])
Possible results of various font setups on the LiveCD are shown on
screenshots located at http://ums.usu.ru/~patrakov/fontshots/ . 16 and
20 are font sizes (in pixels! Arrgh!). Screenshots with names starting
with "Monospace" are prepared with the Monospace generic font alias
being selected, "BitstreamVera" means the hack where the Bitstream Vera
Sans Mono font is selected (but not necessarily used because it contains
very few glyphs).
As you can see, Monospace looks really bad for Greek. This is not the
case with xterm (although one isn't able to cheat with xterm and put all
languages on one screenshot because xterm rightfully consults its own
$LANG when choosing a font). Selecting the (obviously wrong because of
poor Unicode coverage) Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font leads to
surprizingly good results, although glyphs from some proportional fonts
are leaked into the screenshot (that manifests itself in the overlapping
characters).
Question to LiveCD developers: is this hackish "Bitstream Vera Sans
Mono" setup acceptable for the LFS LiveCD release?
Also: what's the proper TrueType font for Korean?
--
Alexander E. Patrakov
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