Re: Lohit vs Noto Indic fonts
by Jens-Ulrik Petersen
On Sat, Jun 17, 2023 at 11:35 AM Dave Crossland <dave(a)lab6.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jun 12, 2023, 4:51 PM pravin.d.s(a)gmail.com <pravin.d.s(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Mon, 12 Jun 2023 at 02:39, Dave Crossland <dave(a)lab6.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm the Noto product owner at Google Fonts, I expect the wider range of
>>> styles available by itself would make Noto fonts a better choice :) I would
>>> be happy to hear any aspects of Lohit that are superior
>>>
>>
>> Lohit follows an open source development methodology. One can provide a
>> patch to the sfd file. We are building from source in Fedora.
>> AFAIK Noto is only available in binary format. (TTF).
>>
>> But given its already used for many languages, we can definitely go ahead
>> for India fonts as well.
>> What i suggest:
>> 1. Lets Noto get installed by default.
>> 2. Lets have Lohit fontconfig priority more than Noto, so if someone
>> installing it manually, it will become default for particular Indian
>> languages.
>>
>
> I love it!
>
>>
Thank you everyone for the feedback so far.
Since the feedback so far seems generally positive, I started drafting
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Indic_Noto_fonts proposal for Fedora
39.
Have given the relative fonts priorities some thought... while in theory I
am sympathetic to the novel priority suggestion, it is probably not
realistic in practice: we have never done default fonts changes that way
before in Fedora so I think it would set a bad precedent, but I think we
should make sure that if one uninstalls the Noto Indic fonts, the Lohit
fonts should still remain the default - I do think that should be possible.
Thanks, Jens
10 months
Lohit vs Noto Indic fonts
by Jens-Ulrik Petersen
Hi, we have been thinking about the default fonts for Indic (Indian)
scripts in Fedora.
For many languages in Fedora we are already using Google's open-source Noto
fonts (for most Western languages and also Arabic and CJK (Chinese,
Japanese and Korean) and more, not least Emoji too. Also already for
Gurmukhi (Punjabi) and Sinhala.
$ rpm -qa google-noto-*-fonts | wc -l
26
Noto fonts have the advantage that they are available in different faces
("Sans" and "Serif") and multiple weights (also as Variable Fonts (VF),
which can save a lot of space). They also seem to be generally actively
maintained.
So we would like feedback on how Indian Fedora users feel about using the
Indic Noto fonts compared to Lohit fonts (which we haven't been able to
maintain actively for some time now), given the above advantages.
Sudip Shil has prepared some comparison screenshots using his fonts-compare
tool of Lohit vs Noto: see
https://sshil.fedorapeople.org/lohit-vs-noto-comparison.html
To easily test Noto yourself, Sudip Shil has also prepared a Copr repo
which contains the Lohit fonts rebuilt with lower priority:
https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/sshil/indic-fonts-test which needs
to be enabled:
$ sudo dnf copr enable sshil/indic-fonts-test
Furthermore it is necessary to install the corresponding Noto VF fonts
$ sudo dnf install google-noto-sans-devanagari-vf-fonts
google-noto-sans-bengali-vf-fonts google-noto-sans-gujarati-vf-fonts
google-noto-sans-kannada-vf-fonts google-noto-sans-oriya-vf-fonts
google-noto-sans-tamil-vf-fonts google-noto-sans-telugu-vf-fonts
Then run:
$ sudo dnf update lohit-*-fonts
*Note*: if you are on Fedora Rawhide you currently have to "dnf remove
lohit-*-fonts" instead, since the Indic Noto fonts there have lower
priority currently.
And now you should see Noto as the default for most Indic scripts:
$ for lang in as bho bn brx doi gu hi hne kn kok mai ml mni mr or pa sa sat
ta te; do echo -en "$lang\t" ; fc-match :lang=$lang family; done
You may prefer to try this first in a test VM, or to shut down your
important applications using Indic text first before changing the fonts on
your system.
The instructions on Sudip's Copr repo also include the steps for undoing
these changes.
Do let us know what you think of the Noto fonts compared to Lohit for Indic
scripts.
If they look good we can consider switching those scripts to default to
Noto.
Jens
--
Fedora & Red Hat i18n team
10 months, 2 weeks
Re: Lohit vs Noto Indic fonts
by pravin.d.s＠gmail.com
On Mon, 12 Jun 2023 at 02:39, Dave Crossland <dave(a)lab6.com> wrote:
> I'm the Noto product owner at Google Fonts, I expect the wider range of
> styles available by itself would make Noto fonts a better choice :) I would
> be happy to hear any aspects of Lohit that are superior
>
Lohit follows an open source development methodology. One can provide a
patch to the sfd file. We are building from source in Fedora.
AFAIK Noto is only available in binary format. (TTF).
But given its already used for many languages, we can definitely go ahead
for India fonts as well.
What i suggest:
1. Lets Noto get installed by default.
2. Lets have Lohit fontconfig priority more than Noto, so if someone
installing it manually, it will become default for particular Indian
languages.
Regards,
Pravin
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10 months, 2 weeks
