langpacks and fonts

[Peter Damoc]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:11:09 +1100, Jeff Waugh <jeff.waugh at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> <quote who="Mattias Eriksson">
>
>> While I like to see all the characters when I accidentally opens a Chinese
>> webpage or document, I think it is bad to have all those useless (for me)
>> fonts in the font selector in OpenOffice.
>
> This is a slightly different problem, and one we should address. None of
> these fonts need to be listed at all, they just need to be available on the
> system for fontconfig to choose them. Perhaps fontconfig has a hide setting
> that we can use.

Sorry to bother you with my almost complete lack of knowledge on this matter but why should "pretty" fonts be "required"?
Shouldn't the defaults be "pretty"?

In my naive view Ubuntu should provide a nice set of fontfaces that should be pretty for everybody.
- monospace
- sans serif
- serif
- calligraphic (cursive)

I don't know how the serif/monospace/calligraphic part applies to the character set for Hebrew or Chinese but if variants for each category can be found they should be in the default font of that category at their coresponding UTF-8 places.

One of the fonts, lets say the sans serif one, should have all the characters (or as much of them as posible) so that every document could be displayed. Language specific fonts should be installed *only* as part of a language specific customization.

-- 
Peter Damoc
jack of all trades, master of none
http://www.sigmacore.net/