langpacks and fonts

[Danilo Šegan]

Today at 12:43, Jeff Waugh wrote:

> <quote who="Shlomi Loubaton">
>
>> Culmus package is very important to us since default Hebrew fonts are
>> usually very ugly.
>
> I think having langpacks depend on fonts is a FANTASTIC idea. We install a
> bunch of fonts by default that we could skip. Also, input modules would be
> useful to install this way as well.

I actually enjoy being able to read (well, to be honest, look at :)
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and other texts with a basic install.
I'd rather have OOo replaced with Gnumeric/teTeX, but that pretty much
speaks of my priorities and relevance you'd give to my personal
opinion :)

Now, if this is the way forward for Ubuntu (completely standalone
language-packs), then there's more to it:

 - per-language keyboard layouts, input methods, X Compose tables
   (this is where xkeyboard config helps, since it differentiates well
   between language and country layouts)
 - per-language-fonts
 - per-language-locales? (this is a bit awkward, we usually consider 
   locales per location such as a country)
 - UI translations
 - doc translations

UI translations should depend on all the former per-language stuff
being installed, and doc translations should depend on UI translations
themselves (i.e. you don't want docs to show translated UI when it's
not available on the system).


Btw, where should I ask to consider DejaVu fonts to replace Bitstream
Vera in Ubuntu? Bugzilla or here?  FWIW, DejaVu fonts have regular
monthly releases (unless there're no changes), and are pretty much
actively maintained, and contain a much better coverage than Vera,
even for Latin scripts.

Cheers,
Danilo