[Fontconfig] Overly aggresive English orthography? [was asian font configuration]

[Owen Taylor]

On Mon, 2004-12-13 at 10:56 -0800, Keith Packard wrote:
> Around 2 o'clock on Dec 13, John Thacker wrote:
> 
> > However, the 4882 Hanja are definitely part of the standard no matter 
> > what.  I'm somewhat surprised that so many fonts would not have them at all,
> > but it certainly must be easier.  
> 
> That's what I thought; we have a 'standard orthography' for Korean as used
> in the Republic of Korea which includes a large set of glyphs which are
> no-longer in common use in the Republic of Korea.
> 
> THere is also a standard from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea 
> (KPS 9566-97) which inclues 4653 Korean Hanja characters.
> 
> 	http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/202.pdf
> 
> The guiding principle for fontconfig's orthography construction is to
> select fonts capable of displaying the preponderance of documents in the
> given language. The English orthography, as an example, includes uncommonly
> used accented letters like é and ï as they appear in many documents,
> although many people accept and use alternate spellings without them.

If you aren't using Pango-style language tag refinement, this causes
some bad problems, see, e.g.:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=107952

I don't actually see much value in such an extensive orthography
for English ... if fontconfig is hunting through all the fonts on
a system for a font to display English, the chances of it coming
up with a nice one is pretty minimal, just on a numerical basis.

Regards,
						Owen

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