[Fontconfig-bugs] [Bug 20911] 65-nonlatin should be updated for CJK fonts

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20911

--- Comment #116 from Mingye Wang (Arthur2e5) <arthur200126 at gmail.com> ---
Jeff Bai <jeffbai at aosc.xyz> and I are currently working on a newer ordering of
this file for the CJK part at
https://github.com/AOSC-Dev/aosc-os-abbs/issues/201. Hopefully we will come up
with a modernized version this weekend or so.

We are mainly focused on these points:

* Separate sans (hei), serif (ming/song) and cursive (kai). Like the current
git version of the file, we are now only adding strongly monospace (i.e.
monospace for non-han parts too) fonts as monospace, but this is actually worth
a discussion IFF the font is only going to provide CJK chars. (We know at least
FW kanas and hanzi/kanjis are always 1em wide (good), while some hanguls are
like .93 em (oops).)
* Font weight matching. Many old CJK serifs (e.g. UMing, SimSun) look too thin
to match common serifs, but the TeX community have good fonts to remedy this --
cwTeX and Fandol fonts. We add [kind of prepend, in CJK ranges] these fonts to
the list accordingly. As a bonus, these are all FOSS. Some CJK sans on the
other hand is too heavy (e.g. SimHei[1]), but now we have Noto Sans CJK/Source
Han Sans to remedy this.
* Sans-serif monospace is better than serif monospace, at least for computer
screens. Additionally, monospace CJK serifs are often old and have the
very-thin-weight issue.

Note that we are not supposed to nor intending to fix any of these "locale mix"
problems like what was shown in the description of attachment 24321. Locale
matching problems should be done via in-browser detection schemes like html
lang tags, with appropriate locale-aware requests to fc, which hopefully will
be handled by other distro-specific config wiles. We are only trying to make
sure the styles of CJK part matches latin fonts matched for the generic family
names, as well as themselves. (This is actually a terrible problem on MS
Windows, where they consider SimSun a sans-serif.)

(Well, considering the widths of some glyphs like 复 in Japanese fonts (they are
often not actually using the glyphs in the language but using it as some glyph
to be referenced by other glyphs), I will go with TW, KR or CN fonts as the
preferred source of Chinese glyphs. Choosing the traditional locales is just
for "going back the roots and be acceptable to as many locales as possible".
(KR glyphs are kind of old/kangxi-ish-style -- lack of use lead to lack of
evolution.))

[1]: In Chinese, Hei (黑) stands for black. This actually caused some confusion
and resulted in many people calling bold weights "Hei".

I have no idea on how to fix the bad "ja" language tags in Chinese fonts
though. (why are they trying to <s>eat</s> manage everything?)

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