[Bug 670615] font autoprovides can be a bit overzealous

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=670615

--- Comment #8 from Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> 2011-01-20 14:47:04 EST ---
ASCII is useless. Almost every ascii-using script is ascii + a few other things
(as Alan Cox likes to point out correct English requires ï for example to write
naïve), except the few other things are not the same so you can't choose a
small ASCII superset without exluding a lot of people that need just a few
other things, and you can't include all those little things without getting
something a lot wider than base latin. Frentch wants éèœçŷêù, German wants ss
(including the new caps variant introduced a couple of years ago, in Spain
Catalans want Ŀ and won't appreciate if Madrid is better served than Barcelona,
etc etc We're no longer in the period where an ALLCAPS ASCII telegram was
considered an acceptable way to render human language, people got used to
digital publishing and want all the squiggles and diacritics that ASCII
dispensed with

Your "safe" reasonable unicode subset will always be out of date and
inconvenient (and don't get me started on monetary symbols, € was unknown a
decade ago and is a must now, who know even if the $ will be with us in a
decade if China decides to let it sink, etc). Really, it's not worth optimizing
this, it's a lot of work for little gain, and besides people are touchy about
this stuff, so it's a lot of better to let dragons rest and not have people
complain $ancestralenemylanguage is better served than $ownlanguage and Fedora
maintainers are a bunch of american imperialists (you get the idea)

For the lucky languages that have many fonts available only manual human
sorting can identify the better shortlist to provide, and that requires work
l10n side, and work on comps language groups, an automated system like
fontconfig is unlikely to provide the filtering you want in that case

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