[Mageia-dev] new fonts?

[brian.smith at blueyonder.co.uk]

On Monday 24 Sep 2012 14:12:53 Liam R E Quin wrote:

> > 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.
> 
> 
> 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.

Thanks for the explanation.

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

Thinking about it my underlying questions are...

1) how do Magia ensure that all new installs get the right default fonts?
Including installs where the user needs characters not supported by 
Liberation.

2) as a user I don't like to see incoming emails / web pages with blobs 
replacing missing characters.
At least if the character is there I can always shove it through Google 
translate.