[libreoffice-design] Re: Offering fonts relevant to the user's chosen language - following UX/design meeting 2024-Sep-25

[Eyal Rozenberg]

On 26/09/2024 13:46, Caolán McNamara wrote:
> On Thu, 2024-09-26 at 00:28 +0300, Eyal Rozenberg wrote:
>> In LibreOffice, we currently partition typefaces, like languages,
>> into three language-groups: Western, RTL-CTL, and CJK
>
> These categories of RTL+CTL/Complex and CJK/EastAsian are baked into
> the odf and open xml file formats,

Indeed... I just found one prominent example of this in the OOXML spec:
17.3.2.20 [1].

But I'm also reminded of something Mike pointed out [2] on bug 151215:
At least when it comes to specifying fonts, Microsoft has moved beyond
this trichotomy. They have multi-language font-spec elements, e.g.:

<a:minorFont>
   <a:latin typeface="Calibri" panose="020F0502020204030204"/>
   <a:ea typeface=""/>
   <a:font script="Jpan" typeface="游明朝"/>
   <a:font script="Hang" typeface="맑은 고딕"/>
   <a:font script="Arab" typeface="Arial"/>
   ... etc. more a:font's here
   <a:font script="Talu" typeface="Microsoft New Tai Lue"/>
   <a:font script="Tfng" typeface="Ebrima"/>
</a:minorFont>

 > so whatever about how they are> presented in the UI the
categorization itself at an internal level is
> probably unavoidable.

... for now :-)  hopefully this could change in a future version of ODF.

 > FWIW with fontconfig, you can see its estimate of language cover

And does fontconfig compute these estimates once and store them in its
meta-data, or is it something it does dynamically?

... Hmm. Looking at:

> $ fc-list -v "David Libre"
> ...
> lang: ... |ha|he|ho| ...

Actually,
it's...aa|ast|ay|bm|bi|bin|br|bs|ch|co|cy|da|de|en|es|et|eu|fi|fj|fo|fr|ff|fur|fy|ga|gd|gl|gn|gv|ha|he|ho|hr|hu|ia|ig|id|ie|io|is|it|ki|kw|la|lb|ln|mg|mi|nb|nds|nl|nn|no|nr|nso|ny|oc|om|pt|rm|sl|sma|smj|smn|so|sq|ss|st|sv|sw|tl|tn|ts|uz|vi|vo|vot|wa|wen|wo|xh|yap|yi|yo|zu|an|fil|hsb|ht|jv|kj|kwm|lg|li|ms|na|ng|pap-an|pap-aw|rn|rw|sc|sg|sn|su|ty|za|agr|ayc|bem|lij|mfe|miq|mjw|nhn|niu|rif|tpi|unm|wae|yuw(s)

and that's a problem, because while that font has a lot of glyphs, most
of them are "junk" glyphs, copy-pasted (?) in there and not actually
designed for the font. But I suppose that's a different problem.


Eyal




  [1]:
https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-376/
  [2]: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151215#c19