Re: Internationalisation and fonts - a suggestion

[Alexander Malmberg]

Pete French wrote:
> In my exploration of fonts this afternoon I came across this project
> on Savannah: http://www.nongnu.org/freefont/ and have been playing with
> these as the default font for a while. I havent seen anyone on this list
> mention these before so I was very interested.

http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnustep/2003-07/msg00210.html

These are one of the two font families I include in the ArtResources
package.

> The FreeSans looks very good
> as the default for Latin users,

Good, thanks to the improved autohinter in recent versions of freetype,
but I wouldn't say very good. The Vera fonts are much better for latin
text (hinted by hand and all that), but unfortunately, they only have
glyphs for basic latin characters. My recommendations are, quoting the
help I wrote for ArtResources:

""
The Vera fonts are well-suited to on-screen use, and it is recommended
that you use these as your default fonts if you deal primarily with
latin-1 (West European) text. To set these as the default fonts for a
user
run 'make vera-default' as that user.
""

""
The FreeFonts are not as well-suited as the Vera fonts to on-screen use,
but they contain a lot more characters. If you deal with non-latin-1
text, it is recommended that you use these as your default fonts (eg. by
running '$(MAKE) freefonts-default').
""

> plus it contains just about everything for
> all other europena languages (including greek, cyrillic and armenian, though
> not georgian). Devenagri and hebrew script is supported, as well as the kana
> parts of japanese. O.K., theres no chinese/kanji and thai is serif-only,
> but thats still a very wide range of scripts and its only going to get wider.
> 
> Plus the fonts are GPL and are aimed at GNU projects which want to ship their
> own fonts as far as I can make out.
> 
> So I was thinking wouldn't it be nice if...
> 
>         1) We shipped these to install automatically with art backend

The only problem here is the size. The FreeFonts are over 1mb
compressed. Users, especially those low on bandwidth, will probably not
want to download that very often, and the backend will probably be
updated more often than the fonts.

>         2) We set the default font for art to be FreeSans

Once backend-specific default user defaults values for fonts are done, I
plan on making -art default to Vera if available, and the FreeFonts
otherwise (by default; you can always set the user defaults manually to
force it to use the FreeFonts; the makefile in ArtResources makes this
easy).

>         3) We make art the default backend
> 
> This would give us much wider support for international languages "out of
> the box" for free, and without any downsides that I can see.

There are, but only in a few cases. For most users, -art is a better
choice, so it would be a good thing to make it the default (imho,
standard disclaimer, etc. :).

- Alexander Malmberg