[Fontconfig] Re: Fonts for distribution

[Simos Xenitellis]

On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 08:21 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Mar 2006, Clytie Siddall wrote:
> 
> > so he might well be willing to incorporate the glyphs for your
> > language. :)
> 
> Making fonts that have glyphs for multiple scripts is in fact not
> recommended in Linux.  Having separate fonts for different
> scripts have various benefits.  Simply, don't do that.

There is a similar discussion going on at the dejavu-devel mailing list.
There is interest from contributors to add glyphs for more languages,
like Arabic and CJK, as it has been with FreeFont which supports with
different levels of quality Latin, Central European, Cyrillic, Greek,
Arabic, CJK and perhaps more.
The issue arises from the fact that to use such a wide-coverage Unicode
fonts, one has to add high on the preference list
at /etc/fonts/fonts.conf
However, by doing so, other fonts are masked (hidden), such as Arabic
and CJK (Kochi).
Therefore, we have the interest of individual contributors to have their
script added or new fonts submitted that have partial support for some
scripts (for example, SIL Doulos has partial Greek support).
What is the best solution to solve this issue?
Is it to put restrictions to fonts? Some fonts are "semi-free", saying
you must not remove glyphs (so, Kochi Gothic cannot remove the bad Greek
support).
Or, should fontconfig be enhanced so that it allows a new configuration
option to mask/hide character ranges on specific fonts?
For the latter, there is a bug report waiting for developer love, at
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5987

Simos