[Mageia-dev] new fonts?

[Liam R E Quin]

On Mon, 2012-09-24 at 18:34 +0100, brian.smith at blueyonder.co.uk wrote:

> I assume any default font should have the complete UTF8 Character set?

This isn't really meaningful, because of unification - fonts implement
glyphs, not characters, and there are a great many Unicode characters
that represent multiple glyphs, mostly as a result of CJK
(Chinese/Chinese/Japanese/Korean) unification.

So the right answer is to have a set of fonts that overall provides the
necessary coverage for scripts and languages that Mageia's users
actually use.

> Are the Liberation Font's UTF8 Complete?
Strictly speaking UTF-8 is an encoding, a way of representing 32-bit
integers in as few bytes (octets) as possible while still working with
text tools; those 32-bit integers are Unicode "codepoints", indices into
a table of characters published by the Unicode Consortium. Currently the
table actually only needs I think 18 bits (more than 16 and less than 24
at any rate), but is still growing.

Wikipedia says,
[[
The Liberation family supports only the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic
alphabets, leaving out many writing systems. Extension to other writing
systems is prevented by its unique licensing terms
]] [1]

However, asking for a single typeface to have a unified design for
Vietnamese, Hindi, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese,
English, French, Czech, Cree, ... is a tall order. You'd also have a
rather large font file (probably between 500M and a gigabyte).

So, the best approach is to choose smaller fonts that work OK with each
other and give the best coverage.

Hope this helps. I responded to more than your question to try & help
others see the issues too :-)

Liam

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml