The most useful feature for me (Debian user, linguist) would be a search system where I can provide a string, and filter fonts to those who include glyphs for all characters; ideally if I could also combine it with other search criteria, like OTF features (true small caps, etc.). I often write academic texts where I use specialized characters not really classifiable by language, script or block (say, 'ǎ/ǚ' for pīnyīn, plus IPA tone marks, plus multiple combining diacritics like 'ā́', all in the same running text). I then need visual inspection to choose a font that actually looks halfway decent, typographically speaking, and to check for bugs in IPA kerning, etc. For a long time now, I've been using a simple Python script to filter fonts in this manner (it just straightforwardly renders the provided characters, then uses `pango.Layout.get_unknown_glyphs_count()` to remove fonts lacking them, and displays all the rest for inspection).
2018-02-18 22:39 GMT+01:00 David Starner via Unicode <[email protected]>: > On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 3:42 AM Adam Borowski <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I probably used a bad example: scripts like Cyrillic (not even Supplement) >> include both essential letters and those which are historic only or used >> by >> old folks in a language spoken by 1000, who use Russian (or English...) >> for >> all computer use anyway -- all within one block. >> >> What I'm thinking, is that a beautiful font that covers Russian, >> Ukrainian, >> Serbian, Kazakh, Mongolian cyr, etc., should be recommended to users >> before >> one whose only grace is including every single codepoint. >> > > I'm not sure what your goal is. Opening up gucharmap shows me that > FreeSerif and Noto Serif both have complete coverage of Cyrillic and > Cyrillic Supplemental. We have reasonable fonts to offer users that cover > everything Cyrillic, or pretty much any script in use. I'm not sure where > and how you're trying to cut a line between a beautiful multilingual font > and a workable full font. > > Ultimately, when I look at fonts, I look for Esperanto support. I'd be a > little surprised if it didn't come with Polish support, but it's unlikely > to be my problem. A useful feature for a font selector for me would be able > to select English, German, and Esperanto and get just the fonts that > support those languages (in an extended sense, including the extra-ASCII > punctuation and accents English needs, for example.) It does me absolutely > no good to know that it has "good, but not complete" Latin-A support. > Likewise, if you're a Persian speaker, knowing that the Arabic block has > "good, but not complete" support is worthless. > > For single language ancient scripts, like Ancient Greek, then virtually > any font with decent coverage should cover the generally useful stuff. For > more complex ancient scripts, it pretty much has to be on a per language > matter. For some ancient scripts, like Runic and Old Italic, I understand > that after unifying the various writings, most people feel a > language-specific font is necessary for any serious work. > > The ultimate problem is that the question is will it support my needs. > Language can often be used as a proxy, but names can often foil that. And > symbols are worse; € is the only character from Currency Symbols that's > used in an extended work in many, many instances, but so is ₪. Percentage > of block support is minimally helpful. Miscellaneous symbols lives up to > its name; ⛤, ⚇, ♷, ♕, and ☵ are all useful symbols, but not likely to be > found in the same work. Again, recommend 100% coverage or do the manual > work of separating them into groups and offering a specific font (game, > occult, etc.) that covers it, but messing around with a beautiful font with > less than 100% coverage versus a decent font with 100% coverage seems > counterproductive. > > Not sure if I understand your advice right: you're recommending to ignore >> all the complexity and going with just raw count of in-block coverage? >> This could work: a released font probably has codepoints its author >> considers important. >> > > I guess separating out by language when you need to is going to be the way > that helps people the most. Where that's most complex, I'm not sure why > you're not just offering a decent 100% coverage font (which Debian has a > decent selection of) and stepping back. >
