Re: Internationalisation and fonts - a suggestion

[Pete French]

> 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

I guess "good" is a relative term :-) I hadnt realised these were the
fonts in the ArtResources package - I remember the Vera lisence discussions,
but mised the fact the Free* fonts were included somehow.

> 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.

GNUstep is 87mb, so I am not sure an extra 1mb is too significant. If
it changes rarely then 'cvs update' wont download it again anyway. For
the packaged up files I would think that it should only be included in
the large "everything" file (is there still one of those ?). I agree with
yoou about the individuaalfiles - but I was thinking of supporting the maximum
amount of stuff "by default". So someone does one download, builds, installs
and it all works without any extra tweaking.

> Once backend-specific default user defaults values for fonts are done, I
> plan on making -art default to Vera if available, and the FreeFonts

Sounds good. If the preferred font stuff is ever implemnted (even if only for
a single font) then it could drop back to FreeSans too.

I do think that for those users who dont want to wade through piles
of documentation to get things working that we should make the process
as simple as possible, and have the default install be as widespread as
possible. i.e. Install FreeSans by default, and put up a note to say that if
you only use Latin1 then there is a better default font which can easily be
installed instead using 'make install-vera'.

Shipping a system which is, by default, only useful to latin language
speakers just seems to be a bit impolite when we could do so much better,
albeit wth a slight loss of quality on the latin fonts.

> 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. :).

In this I agree with you whole heartedly. Moving to art pretty much solved
all the issues I had with GNUstep and I have never looked back.

-bat.