[Fwd: Re: Request for review and advice on wqy-bitmap-fonts fontconfig settings]

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Mar 4 décembre 2007 08:35, Behdad Esfahbod a écrit :
> On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 21:58 -0500, Qianqian Fang wrote:

Hi,

I've let Behdad answer so far because he's the most qualified on the
pango front, but I've wanted to reafirm some points for a few days, so
I'll do it now:

Your core problem as I wrote in one of my first mails is your font is
providing bad glyphs for unicode blocks you don't really want to
touch, and you're changing locales you shouldn't change so the easier
and fastest solution for you has always beent to

>   - Remove Latin and ASCII digits from your font.  Why is it there if
> it's not desired?

You have the chance to package a free/open-libre font, this is
something that couldn't be done for most fonts but you can do it so
don't hesitate to do it.

> Nicolas suggested that fontconfig adds support for
> conditional blacklisting of individual blocks/glyphs in a font.  That
> would help too, but it's not in fontconfig yet.

Unfortunately many fonts are not so open and users still depend on
them. So some sort of fontconfig blacklisting support is needed to
support those fonts and users. From these exchanges, it seems chinese
users are most affected by this problem.

Since you have contacts in the chinese fonts community do consider
reviving the patches posted on the fontconfig list in the past or
writing others. Have chinese users indicate on the fontconfig list
their support for them. It's not a short-term fix, but it's the right
long-term fix, and if you don't push it this year you'll hit the same
problem again and again till someone does this work.

Last time the problem was discussed on fontconfig lists almost no one
stepped in to write he needed this change. So fontconfig developpers
decided it was a lot of work with no real need, and passed.

The moral of this story is: your problems won't be fixed if you only
focus on workarounds (as you're doing now) and let others with no core
interest at stake drive changes. I know that culturally chinese people
tend to avoid open disagreement, but if you need fontconfig to change
silently hoping for fontconfig maintainers to realise this won't work.

Similarly, if you need good Chinese rendering in non-chinese locales,
chinifying en_US is not the solution. We've not heard from Japanese
users yet but I'm sure they would strongly object to chinese-oriented
defaults. That means you need to push for apps that do not do it yet
to pass language info for properly tagged text to pango (like firefox
does) and push for some sort of input language notification system.

You can of course pass and hope others will do it but in the meantime
you'll have to accept any workaround that affects users in other
locales won't be accepted in the distro. And since getting proper
localised input working is the only way to get your stuff working
without side-effects for those other users, that means chinese users
won't have optimal defaults in the meantime.

>> Back to the original topic of this thread, how do you think the
>> fontconfig file in my last email?

The version posted on
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-fonts-list/2007-November/msg00088.html

looks mostly fine, except I'm not sure the DejaVu LGC Sans Mono in
monospace is needed and you rely on a high priority (61) to stomp on
other CJK fonts (and probably others). IMHO this needs to be approved
by Jens and the language teams affected.

For the version on
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-fonts-list/2007-December/msg00002.html

I'm not sure what the selectfont is there for. And likewise you have
all sorts of stuff in monospace that assumes specific latin defaults
out of your control. Will probably work most of the time, but removing
the latin glyphs in your fonts would solve this in a more robust way.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot