Lohit vs Noto Indic fonts

[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