On Mon, 2012-09-24 at 18:34 +0100, [email protected] wrote: > I assume any default font should have the complete UTF8 Character set?
This isn't really meaningful, because of unification - fonts implement glyphs, not characters, and there are a great many Unicode characters that represent multiple glyphs, mostly as a result of CJK (Chinese/Chinese/Japanese/Korean) unification. So the right answer is to have a set of fonts that overall provides the necessary coverage for scripts and languages that Mageia's users actually use. > Are the Liberation Font's UTF8 Complete? Strictly speaking UTF-8 is an encoding, a way of representing 32-bit integers in as few bytes (octets) as possible while still working with text tools; those 32-bit integers are Unicode "codepoints", indices into a table of characters published by the Unicode Consortium. Currently the table actually only needs I think 18 bits (more than 16 and less than 24 at any rate), but is still growing. Wikipedia says, [[ The Liberation family supports only the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, leaving out many writing systems. Extension to other writing systems is prevented by its unique licensing terms ]] [1] However, asking for a single typeface to have a unified design for Vietnamese, Hindi, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Czech, Cree, ... is a tall order. You'd also have a rather large font file (probably between 500M and a gigabyte). So, the best approach is to choose smaller fonts that work OK with each other and give the best coverage. Hope this helps. I responded to more than your question to try & help others see the issues too :-) Liam [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts -- Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/ Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml
