Comments on: fontcrime – less is more

By: Davyd

Davyd — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I was under the impression that font selection in general was handled by fontconfig, not by Pango (I will accept being corrected).

By: Bruce Cowan

Bruce Cowan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ubuntu already ships with a font “that includes everything”, it’s DejaVu – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts

No period.

By: Owen Taylor

Owen Taylor — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There is no, repeat, no, “fewer characters is better” mechanism in fontconfig (which does the font selection) or Pango. Fontconfig will prefer a font that has all the characters needed for the current language. But beyond that, it’s all up to the fontconfig config files on your system, which in fact, most likely do list Kochi Gothic explicitly as a good font to use for “sans-serif”.

(The current language is the language specified by the app/document if it gives one, otherwise your locale’s current language. If however that language doesn’t match the script: if the text couldn’t be in the locale’s language, then Pango tries to guess a language from the script… that is, if the script is Greek, it will guess a language of ‘el’. Since your current language isn’t Chinese, Japaense or Korean, and you can’t really guess what language an isolated Han character is from, Pango will use the generic xx language code for your example above, which disables the preference for fonts with all the characters in the language entirely.)

By: yosch

yosch — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Check out the work being done on reviewing the best free/libre/open fonts available per script and the related fontconfig settings via Freedesktop: http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fFonts

By: Clare

Clare — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

(Note: I brought up this topic after seeing Ryan having pasta with his chopsticks!)

I don’t know if the choice of the encoding is related to the problem or not. Please keep in mind there are many encodings for Chinese alone – 5 for simplified and 3 for traditional. (Don’t ask me why there are so many encoding.) Sometimes the browsers, even when using other operating systems, are left to guess which encoding the pages are using because the encoding is not specified.

It seems to me that you don’t need Chinese or Japanese calligraphy lessons to know the characters are in different fonts. :)

By: desrt

desrt — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Clare: were you using the desktop/application in a CJK language or were you just displaying some random Kanji in an otherwise english desktop?

By: Clare

Clare — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I was using firefox displaying (non random) Chinese characters. The font rendering is usually bad in wikipedia’s Chinese articles.

By: desrt

desrt — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

maybe it’s a firefox bug where it could set a language tag in pango but it doesn’t….

By: Behdad Esfahbod

Behdad Esfahbod — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I opened this bug to track this issue:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=353326