ESC meeting minutes: 2024-06-06

[Eyal Rozenberg]

That's an interesting point... personally, I was not even aware of this
ability of fontconfig (although it does make a lot of sense when I think
about it). That means I probably need to qualify what I said on the bug
page, somewhat.

About this delegation, however: What happens if the user has not
installed packges which include appropriate substitution rules? For
example, for Hebrew, there is the Culmus font package which contains our
default "David CLM" font, which is a substitute for "David", a popular
non-free font. If you install LO but not Culmus, you don't get that
substitution rule. Now, we don't need Culmus installed since we bundle
the font ourselves, but - if we rely on the substitution rule, shouldn't
we either depend on the package (via our RPMs or DEBs) or bundle the rule?


On 10/06/2024 23:42, Caolán McNamara wrote:
> On Fri, 2024-06-07 at 01:36 +0300, Eyal Rozenberg wrote:
>> Everyone note that in additional to fallbacks, there is also the
>> matter of substitutions, where we are doing very poorly when it comes
>> to document rendering: We offer no default substitution tables for
>> various languages' popular non-free fonts!
>>
>> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=120131
>
> On Linux (and similar) for font substitution we basically delegate all
> of this to fontconfig. Maybe we'd be better off doing the same on
> Windows (assuming that's the platform in question) and bundle
> fontconfig (or the fontconfig substitution rules) and reuse that
> solution and ditch our built-in sort of equivalent thing which isn't
> really used anyway on the fontconfig platforms (and then maybe that
> allows removing the whole bespoke tools, font, replacement table thing)