Hi,
In the recent online I18n session at FUDConF8 there was some discussion of installation defaults related to international language support, and it was suggested that we should be installing more fonts by default to get better desktop language display coverage out of the box.
So I would like to propose we start installing the following fonts by default on the desktop:
fonts-ISO8859-2, fonts-KOI8-R, fonts-arabic, fonts-chinese, fonts-hebrew, fonts-indic, fonts-japanese, fonts-korean, fonts-sinhala, and xorg-x11-fonts.
I believe the mainstream commercial desktop OS's already do this.
dejavu-fonts and dejavu-fonts-experimental also occur in quite a few language groups, so they might be worth including too?
Any comments or suggestions on this?
Jens
On 8/22/07, Jens Petersen petersen@redhat.com wrote:
In the recent online I18n session at FUDConF8 there was some discussion of installation defaults related to international language support, and it was suggested that we should be installing more fonts by default to get better desktop language display coverage out of the box.
Might be a good idea. Given that spinning out Fedora is now relatively easier, those with a predefined font content set might be well placed to yum remove in %post perhaps. The only thing I see is that the installation payload increases - given the trade off with aesthetics that might not be too bad. Any pointers as to the payload quantum increase ?
So I would like to propose we start installing the following fonts by default on the desktop:
fonts-ISO8859-2, fonts-KOI8-R, fonts-arabic, fonts-chinese, fonts-hebrew, fonts-indic, fonts-japanese, fonts-korean, fonts-sinhala, and xorg-x11-fonts.
Nice.
I believe the mainstream commercial desktop OS's already do this.
Some "other" Linux OSs do this too :)
dejavu-fonts and dejavu-fonts-experimental also occur in quite a few language groups, so they might be worth including too?
That's an overkill right ?
:Sankarshan
hi Jens
it is a great news for better font support on Fedora. I am curious if it is possible to consider wqy-bitmap-fonts as the default desktop font for Chinese locales? the bitmap glyphs were continuously improved in the past ~3 years based on the embedded bitmaps in fonts-chinese and the wqy-bitmapfont was widely used by simplified Chinese users.
also, WenQuanYi Project plans to release a dual-width bitmap font similar to GNU Unifont, by merging about 28,000 16x16 new Chinese glyphs with the latest release of Unifont (the Chinese glyphs in unifont is neither complete nor optimized). The new font will cover about 46000 unicode code points and serve as a basic multi-lingual support (such as in installer) and system font fall-back.
we just put out a new GPL Chinese font, Zen Hei, for public testing. This is a Hei Ti style (Gothic in Japanese or Dotum in Korean) Chinese font, servers for general purpose Chinese display and printing. Current, it has 20194 Chinese characters (or ~32000 glyphs if include Hangul) and covers zh_cn/sg/tw/hk/mo locales. The file is reasonably small including about 100,000 fine-tuned embedded bitmap glyphs. The beta version can be downloaded at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=128192&package_id=...
If these fonts are interesting to fedora i18n group, I would be glad to help for testing and further improving.
Please let me know.
Qianqian
Jens Petersen wrote:
Hi,
In the recent online I18n session at FUDConF8 there was some discussion of installation defaults related to international language support, and it was suggested that we should be installing more fonts by default to get better desktop language display coverage out of the box.
So I would like to propose we start installing the following fonts by default on the desktop:
fonts-ISO8859-2, fonts-KOI8-R, fonts-arabic, fonts-chinese, fonts-hebrew, fonts-indic, fonts-japanese, fonts-korean, fonts-sinhala, and xorg-x11-fonts.
I believe the mainstream commercial desktop OS's already do this.
dejavu-fonts and dejavu-fonts-experimental also occur in quite a few language groups, so they might be worth including too?
Any comments or suggestions on this?
Jens
-- Fedora-i18n-list mailing list Fedora-i18n-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-i18n-list
by the way, I forget to introduce myself and my project - the WenQuanYi project (http://wqy.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/enindex.cgi).
I started the WenQuanYi project in 2004 for making better fonts for Chinese, Japanese and Korean users. It is now becoming arguably the largest collaborative open-source font development project. In the past 3 years, we have completed drawing over 40,000 Chinese bitmap glyphs from scratch and improved 30,000~40,000 existing Chinese glyphs. Now we have full coverage of CJK Unified Ideographics (U4E00-U9FA5, 20,902 char.) and CJK Unified Ideographics Extension A (U3400~U4DB5, 6,582 characters) at 8,9,10,11,12,14pt, for on-screen display of Chinese characters.
Parallel to the work of Arne Götje's team, who led the efforts of building new fonts based on Arphic Ming/Kai fonts, we also spend lots of of our time for outline font development. Our first outline font, the ZenHei is now in testing. This font has complete coverage of zh_* locales, ko locale, and is about 100 characters away for full ja coverage.
There has been thousands of volunteers participated our font development via our wiki website. I think it is quite meaningful to put forth these works and make real impact to high-quality international support for Linux community. I am also glad to be involved for continuously improving these works together with our developer teams and share with you our passion and creativities.
Jens Petersen wrote:
Hi,
In the recent online I18n session at FUDConF8 there was some discussion of installation defaults related to international language support, and it was suggested that we should be installing more fonts by default to get better desktop language display coverage out of the box.
So I would like to propose we start installing the following fonts by default on the desktop:
fonts-ISO8859-2, fonts-KOI8-R, fonts-arabic, fonts-chinese, fonts-hebrew, fonts-indic, fonts-japanese, fonts-korean, fonts-sinhala, and xorg-x11-fonts.
I believe the mainstream commercial desktop OS's already do this.
dejavu-fonts and dejavu-fonts-experimental also occur in quite a few language groups, so they might be worth including too?
Any comments or suggestions on this?
Jens
-- Fedora-i18n-list mailing list Fedora-i18n-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-i18n-list
-- Fedora-i18n-list mailing list Fedora-i18n-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-i18n-list
Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay さんは書きました:
The only thing I see is that the installation payload increases - given the trade off with aesthetics that might not be too bad. Any pointers as to the payload quantum increase ?
Yep, that is the only downside really, but in terms of convenience to most users it is worth it I think. The only really big fonts are the CJK ones.
Here are some figures to give an idea:
29605 fonts-punjabi-2.1.5-2.fc8.noarch.rpm 43699 fonts-tamil-2.1.5-2.fc8.noarch.rpm 44635 fonts-malayalam-2.1.5-2.fc8.noarch.rpm 53215 fonts-gujarati-2.1.5-2.fc8.noarch.rpm 54951 fonts-hindi-2.1.5-2.fc8.noarch.rpm 63166 fonts-kannada-2.1.5-2.fc8.noarch.rpm 65283 fonts-oriya-2.1.5-2.fc8.noarch.rpm 68111 fonts-telugu-2.1.5-2.fc8.noarch.rpm 85979 fonts-bengali-2.1.5-2.fc8.noarch.rpm 110581 fonts-sinhala-0.2.2-1.fc7.noarch.rpm 128774 fonts-KOI8-R-1.0-9.1.1.noarch.rpm 164358 xorg-x11-fonts-ethiopic-7.2-1.fc8.noarch.rpm 299715 fonts-KOI8-R-100dpi-1.0-9.1.1.noarch.rpm 402185 xorg-x11-fonts-cyrillic-7.2-1.fc8.noarch.rpm 689518 fonts-KOI8-R-75dpi-1.0-9.1.1.noarch.rpm 922700 xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-2-75dpi-7.2-1.fc8.noarch.rpm 953223 xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-9-75dpi-7.2-1.fc8.noarch.rpm 993496 fonts-arabic-2.0-6.fc8.noarch.rpm 1033785 fonts-hebrew-0.100-5.fc8.noarch.rpm 1055599 xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-2-100dpi-7.2-1.fc8.noarch.rpm 1104957 xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-9-100dpi-7.2-1.fc8.noarch.rpm 1281179 xorg-x11-fonts-syriac-7.2-1.fc8.noarch.rpm 4943756 wqy-bitmap-fonts-0.8.1-6.fc8.noarch.rpm 19125009 fonts-korean-2.2-3.fc8.noarch.rpm 25116800 fonts-chinese-3.03-7.fc8.noarch.rpm 29860882 fonts-japanese-0.20061016-8.fc8.noarch.rpm
Typically fonts don't get updated much between releases.
I don't know if we really need to have both 75dpi and 100dpi by default.
Jens
Hi Qianqian,
Thanks for your mail.
Qianqian Fang さんは書きました:
it is a great news for better font support on Fedora. I am curious if it is possible to consider wqy-bitmap-fonts as the default desktop font for Chinese locales? the bitmap glyphs were continuously improved in the past ~3 years based on the embedded bitmaps in fonts-chinese and the wqy-bitmapfont was widely used by simplified Chinese users.
I think it is certainly worth considering. One way to get more input on this might be to run a user survey say asking the preferred default fonts for each language.
BTW it so happens that currently we are working to move cjkunifonts and taipei-fonts out of fonts-chinese into separate packages: so now is a good time to start discussing this.
also, WenQuanYi Project plans to release a dual-width bitmap font similar to GNU Unifont, by merging about 28,000 16x16 new Chinese glyphs with the latest release of Unifont (the Chinese glyphs in unifont is neither complete nor optimized). The new font will cover about 46000 unicode code points and serve as a basic multi-lingual support (such as in installer) and system font fall-back.
Very nice. :)
we just put out a new GPL Chinese font, Zen Hei, for public testing. This is a Hei Ti style (Gothic in Japanese or Dotum in Korean) Chinese font, servers for general purpose Chinese display and printing. Current, it has 20194 Chinese characters (or ~32000 glyphs if include Hangul) and covers zh_cn/sg/tw/hk/mo locales. The file is reasonably small including about 100,000 fine-tuned embedded bitmap glyphs. The beta version can be downloaded at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=128192&package_id=...
Ok great, thank you for that too - we would certainly try to take a look at those. Are you planning to package it for Fedora when it is released? :-)
Jens
Qianqian Fang さんは書きました:
I started the WenQuanYi project in 2004 for making better fonts for Chinese, Japanese and Korean users. It is now becoming arguably the largest collaborative open-source font development project. In the past 3 years, we have completed drawing over 40,000 Chinese bitmap glyphs from scratch and improved 30,000~40,000 existing Chinese glyphs. Now we have full coverage of CJK Unified Ideographics (U4E00-U9FA5, 20,902 char.) and CJK Unified Ideographics Extension A (U3400~U4DB5, 6,582 characters) at 8,9,10,11,12,14pt, for on-screen display of Chinese characters.
Yes, it is a really great achievement! And as you write a very good example of free open peer-based development. :-)
There has been thousands of volunteers participated our font development via our wiki website. I think it is quite meaningful to put forth these works and make real impact to high-quality international support for Linux community. I am also glad to be involved for continuously improving these works together with our developer teams and share with you our passion and creativities.
It is great we have wqy-bitmap-fonts included in Fedora thanks to you. I certainly hope to see many more users of wqy fonts in the future!
Jens
On Wed, 2007-08-22 at 15:15 +1000, Jens Petersen wrote:
In the recent online I18n session at FUDConF8 there was some discussion of installation defaults related to international language support, and it was suggested that we should be installing more fonts by default to get better desktop language display coverage out of the box.
I think it's a good idea. I'd suggest that we do it by moving the fonts to be "default" in the base-x group of comps.
Jeremy
Jens Petersen wrote:
One way to get more input on this might be to run a user survey say asking the preferred default fonts for each language.
that's a great idea
Ok great, thank you for that too - we would certainly try to take a look at those. Are you planning to package it for Fedora when it is released? :-)
definitely. I am in the final stage of polishing the font and drawing tens of missing Japanese Hanzi. When I am satisfy with the font, I will submit it as a Fedora new package for review.
Le mercredi 22 août 2007 à 10:50 +0530, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay a écrit :
dejavu-fonts and dejavu-fonts-experimental also occur in quite a few language groups, so they might be worth including too?
I'd rather wait till they get a farsi-friendly arabic variant now that Behdad added locl support to Pango (unless the pango support is good enough to ignore glyphs not specifically tagged for a locale)
That's an overkill right ?
It's not an overkill, the complete variant of dejavu includes many unicode blocks we have no support for in other fonts, so it's referenced in the associated language groups (it's *not* referenced in the language groups dejavu-lgc already covers)
I'd like Fedora to do a periodic review (at Test1 or 2) of what fonts are installed by default, so new fonts are added and fonts superseded by others are dropped. Big font lists are very user-unfriendly, especially when they stuffed with fonts only a few locales use (ie block-specific fonts as opposed to pan-unicode ones)
Le mercredi 22 août 2007 à 09:13 -0400, Jeremy Katz a écrit :
On Wed, 2007-08-22 at 15:15 +1000, Jens Petersen wrote:
In the recent online I18n session at FUDConF8 there was some discussion of installation defaults related to international language support, and it was suggested that we should be installing more fonts by default to get better desktop language display coverage out of the box.
I think it's a good idea. I'd suggest that we do it by moving the fonts to be "default" in the base-x group of comps.
However a copy should be kept in language-specific groups so the classification is not lost
Nicolas Mailhot さんは書きました:
dejavu-fonts and dejavu-fonts-experimental also occur in quite a few language groups, so they might be worth including too?
I'd rather wait till they get a farsi-friendly arabic variant now that Behdad added locl support to Pango (unless the pango support is good enough to ignore glyphs not specifically tagged for a locale)
Hm, ok - do we have suitable Farsi font currently in Fedora? Presumably dejavu-fonts will eventually obsolete dejavu-lgc-fonts?
It's not an overkill, the complete variant of dejavu includes many unicode blocks we have no support for in other fonts, so it's referenced in the associated language groups (it's *not* referenced in the language groups dejavu-lgc already covers)
Right, so from that point of view it would be nice to default to the full font and there is not much difference in terms of size.
I'd like Fedora to do a periodic review (at Test1 or 2) of what fonts are installed by default, so new fonts are added and fonts superseded by others are dropped. Big font lists are very user-unfriendly, especially when they stuffed with fonts only a few locales use (ie block-specific fonts as opposed to pan-unicode ones)
Sounds like a good idea. Fedora I18n could help with that specially for Asian fonts. Is there a good place on the wiki to put a reminder to do that during each release test cycle? In checklist under RelEng perhaps?
Jens
Thanks to everyone for all the useful comments and feedback.
So I have added the following fonts to the default section of the f8 base-x comps group for now:
fonts-ISO8859-2*, fonts-KOI8-R*, fonts-arabic, fonts-bengali, fonts-chinese, fonts-gujarati, fonts-hebrew, fonts-hindi, fonts-japanese, fonts-kannada, fonts-korean, fonts-oriya, fonts-punjabi, fonts-sinhala, fonts-tamil, fonts-telugu, jomolhari-fonts, xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-9-*, xorg-x11-fonts-cyrillic, xorg-x11-fonts-ethiopic
I hope that looks reasonable.
[*] I was wondering if we really need both 75dpi and 100dpi variants of the bitmap fonts installed by default for fonts-ISO8859-2, fonts-KOI8-R, and xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-9? Perhaps it would be sufficient to just install the 75dpi fonts by default and make the 100dpi ones optional?
Jens
PS I have been pondering lately if we should have a comps group for fonts? Perhaps that would be a good easy place to keep all the fonts packages together?
Le jeudi 23 août 2007 à 11:46 +1000, Jens Petersen a écrit :
[*] I was wondering if we really need both 75dpi and 100dpi variants of the bitmap fonts installed by default for fonts-ISO8859-2, fonts-KOI8-R, and xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-9? Perhaps it would be sufficient to just install the 75dpi fonts by default and make the 100dpi ones optional?
IMHO: - bitmap fonts should be optional except for languages like chinese who really want them - hardware has been using a ~100doi resolution for years. Drop the 75dpi variant
Le Jeu 23 août 2007 02:43, Jens Petersen a écrit :
Nicolas Mailhot さんは書きました:
dejavu-fonts and dejavu-fonts-experimental also occur in quite a few language groups, so they might be worth including too?
I'd rather wait till they get a farsi-friendly arabic variant now
that
Behdad added locl support to Pango (unless the pango support is
good
enough to ignore glyphs not specifically tagged for a locale)
Hm, ok - do we have suitable Farsi font currently in Fedora?
Yes. However we don't have a dual arabic/farsi font right now so you can't default install fonts for those languages (if the arabic variant gets higher fontconfig prio farsi users are pissed and vice versa). The problem is ara and farsi share the same unicode glyph range but they're not supposed to be drawn the same way
Presumably dejavu-fonts will eventually obsolete dejavu-lgc-fonts?
Hopefully dejavu will include both arabic glyph variants someday so we can install fonts with arabic glyphs without users objecting.
Sounds like a good idea. Fedora I18n could help with that specially for Asian fonts. Is there a good place on the wiki to put a reminder to do that during each release test cycle? In checklist under RelEng perhaps?
Debian maintains a font table in a wiki for its installer, maybe we can do the same
Qianqian Fang さんは書きました:
it is a great news for better font support on Fedora. I am curious if it is possible to consider wqy-bitmap-fonts as the default desktop font for Chinese locales?
I think wqy-bitmap-fonts will be installed by default for Chinese support in Fedora 8 but the truetype cjkunifonts will remain the default desktop font for Chinese for now.
Thanks, Jens
that's great! I am so glad that wqy-bitmap-fonts made it to F8. I am looking forward to contributing more Chinese fonts to Fedora in the near future.
Qianqian
Jens Petersen wrote:
Qianqian Fang さんは書きました:
it is a great news for better font support on Fedora. I am curious if it is possible to consider wqy-bitmap-fonts as the default desktop font for Chinese locales?
I think wqy-bitmap-fonts will be installed by default for Chinese support in Fedora 8 but the truetype cjkunifonts will remain the default desktop font for Chinese for now.
Thanks, Jens
-- Fedora-i18n-list mailing list Fedora-i18n-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-i18n-list
i18n@lists.stg.fedoraproject.org
-
Jens-Ulrik Petersen -
Jeremy Katz -
Nicolas Mailhot -
Qianqian Fang -
Sankarshan (সঙ্কর্ষণ)