Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
> Dejavu was IMHO chosen as it contains a reasonable wide set of
> characters compared to other fonts. However, if it doesn't contain all
> the required characters we need to either
> a) improve dejavu
Better not. There are specialists for that. Let's focus on OSM, not font 
design. There is a list of fonts here:
http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/
They mention a lot of free fonts. for SEA, the Thai font as an example 
looks high quality and is GPL.

> b) use SVG fonts (how?)
I posted an example some days ago how to convert a font (unifont, the 
one mapnik uses) to SVG and use it:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tilesathome/2009-September/006027.html

The job would be to agree to a common font, or set of fonts.

> c) allow the clients to use different fonts, although I am very unsure
> of how that could/would technically work.
That is the situation we have now. Each linux distribution includes it's 
own set of fonts, including these the user is installing (or not).
This leads to a different appearance already.

>> If anyone does know a way that I can get it to use the south east
>> asian fonts I've tried installing as well as DejaVu that would be
>> great, but SVG fonts sounds like the best way forward.
Batik does use installed fonts. Inkscape in some non-portable way.
See the description in the wiki on how to install the fonts:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tiles%40home/Install_Guide#Non-latin_fonts

You will notice a different set of fonts for the different distributions.

Windows would already include all needed fonts, but I supply dejavu and 
unifont with my version of the installer.

> I don't think it would be a great idea to have different client use
> different fonts. Names often overlap tiles and if they are in different
> fonts, that's bad too.
I agree this is an issue, but right now I don't notice too many broken 
renderings. It's only affecting Z12 Tiles. In Asia there are not that 
many edits on the affected tiles to produce this problem.
I check that area regularly for rendering problems.

Every user should check his setup after installation as I described it 
in the wiki.

I thought about starting a testrun at the end of an install to be sure 
all components are there.

Stephan

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