About Vera fonts (was: Fedora Core 2 wishlists)

[Owen Taylor]

On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 04:14, Julien Olivier wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 22:18, Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 10:40:03PM -0700, Dax Kelson wrote:
> > > * A generic LDAP browser (GQ or something).
> > > * Use Bitstream vera fonts by default
> > 
> > This would need Vera updating to include symbols the rest of the world
> > apart from Americans need.
> 
> Maybe a naive question, but wouldn't it be possible to fall-back to
> another font when trying to display symbols unavailable in vera ? Or
> make vera the default when you select a West European or American
> timezone ?

It *will* fall back currently, but that looks really ugly. You
don't want some characters in a word to have a different font
than others.

If LC_CTYPE is set to a language that isn't supported by your top 
font in the Sans alias, fontconfig will use a different font by 
default (e.g., cyrillic languages won't get Luxi as the default),
but in general, we would like to have the same defaults for all
Western languages ... it's hard to do QA / graphics design if
you get different fonts for different languages.

> Or a third possibility (maybe impossible for legal or technical reasons)
> would be to add the missing symbols directly into the Vera fonts (by
> copy/paste of the symbols from Nimbus). Is it a stupid proposition ?

That would also look really ugly :-)

I should point out that the main reason for staying with Luxi Sans/Luxi
Mono/Nimbus Roman as our default fonts instead of the Vera fonts is that
I wasn't convinced that the Vera fonts actually looked better... 
coverage was a secondary issue.

Regards,
					Owen