[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 151122] Need some indication of font (family) coverage range when selecting fonts

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151122

--- Comment #12 from Eyal Rozenberg <eyalroz1 at gmx.com> ---
(In reply to Telesto from comment #10)
> You ask yourself, does the Hebrew font cover the same characters as the
> Western font.. Now I get it :-).

Oh, you made the wrong mistake :-P

First of all - that's meaningless. There's no need for the font used for Arabic
(not Hebrew, the screenshots has Arabic sample text despite Hebrew being
selected as the language which is another bug I should file I think) to cover
the same characters as the one of Western scripts. In fact, they might as well
be disjoint.

I was expecting you to say "the three fonts look almost similar in Arabic"

In fact, _none_ of the three fonts in the screenshots supports Arabic, or
Hebrew, at all. It only looks like they do, and it even looks like the three
fonts are slightly different - as apparently somehow the glyph spacing is taken
from the font's general meta-data, so the result doesn't look the same. If you
choose one of these fonts for CTL, you'll just get some fallback font glyphs
used, and you would not be told which font (family) those fallback glyphs are
taken from.

This is a problem for people, because:

* The user believes a certain font supports Arabic, while it doesn't.
* If the user sends this file to another person, that other person is likely to
see it rendered differently - depending on which OS, VCL and font choices they
have, which in turn determines the fallback font used.
* The chosen font may cover one CTL language's range of glyphs but not another
one's. Even if the preview corresponded to the chosen language - how would the
user choose a font which has glyphs for both, say, Hebrew and Arabic? Or Arabic
and Shahmukhi (Punjabi)?

The third problem affects fewer people - but still, quite a few. The first two
problems are faced by RTL/CTL users all the time. In fact, all three problems
affect even people who only use LTR/Western languages, as in the example I gave
with Cyrillic, above.

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