[Debian-in-workers] afew ideas..

[Soumyadip Modak]

On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 22:32, Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan wrote:
> I didn't know the existance of this list until today.
> 
> WHile checking the archives, I found the existance of ttf-indic-fonts
> package. My suggestion is to keep it a virtual package which inturn 
> installs the individual font packages. We already have tamil, malayalam
> and bengali. Let us add Gujarathi, Devanagari, Kannada etc (all these have
> GPL'ed OTF fonts).

Good idea, it would help in standardising the font packaging, but IMHO
having separate packages containing only one font (as for Kannada,
Telugu, Gujarati, etc.) is not efficient. As soon as we have a couple of
more fonts for these languages, I'm sure it'll be more feasible to have
a separate package for them (like Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam). 

In this context, quoting from G.Karunakar's mail on Tue, 18 May:

>I am thinking of a indic-otf font package, which will include a font
>for each language (basically from above package only), all fonts under
>GPL, and which matchup well in a multilang string. Idea basically is
>these fonts will serve as default for the language, in absence of any
>user speficied one.

I think this would be a great way to better utilise the ttf-indic-fonts
package. Anyone would need to install only the base ttf-indic-fonts
package in order to view documents or very occasional editing. For
people who need to work on a particular language on a regular basis,
there would be packages providing extra fonts. But my efforts at
contacting the maintainers of the other font packages (namely:
ttf-bangla-fonts, ttf-tamil-fonts and ttf-malayalam-fonts) over this
mailing list have been fruitless.
-- 
Soumyadip Modak
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