[Debian-in-workers] Question about Sans/Serif aliases

[Arne Goetje]

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Hi all,

please CC to me, I'm not on the list.

I'm in charge of i18n support in Ubuntu.
As I'm going to repackage the ttf-indic-fonts packages, I want to make
sure that the fontconfig settings are correct.

I'm repackaging the fonts to split the packages into a -core and an
- -extra packages, the -core packages only contain the minimum required
fonts for the Live CD, while the -extra packages contain the remaining
fonts.

The current version in Debian (0.5.0) chooses the following fonts for
sans / serif:

		sans		serif
- ------------------------------------------------
Bengali:	lohit_bn	MuktiNarrow
Devanagari:	Gargi_1.7	lohit_hi
Gujarati:	Rekha		lohit_gu
Kannada:	Kedage_n	Malige_n
Malayalam:	Rachana		MalOtf
Oriya:		utkal		utkal
Punjabi:	Saab		lohit_pa
Tamil:		TAMu_Kaljani	lohit_ta
Telugu:		Pothana2000	Vemana

Gargi_1.7 has changed to gargi. I will update the fontconfig file
accordingly.

Now, I examined that of these the following fonts are the only serif
(modulated) ones:
Rekha, Kedage_n, Rachana, TAMU_Kalyani and Pothana2000.

All other fonts are actually sans-serif (unmodulated) ones.

Some of the serif fonts surprisingly use sans-serif Latin glyphs, however...

1. is there a reason, why Rekha, Kedage_n, Rachana, TAMU_Kalyani and
Pothana2000 are actually advertised as sans-serif and that all fonts
advertised as serif are actually sans-serif? Even with serif fonts
available for most scripts?

2. How well are these fonts maintained? I have seen that some fonts have
changed drastically between 0.4.9 and 0.5.0, some losing a lot of
precomposed ligature glyphs. I've also seen that there is a attempt to
get Malayalam script into DejaVu Sans. Do you know anything about that?
Is there any planning on future font/script coverage?

3. Have you tested the fontconfig lang tag? Does it actually work for
you, that with an indic locale the specified fonts get selected for sans
/ serif? I tried to boot Ubuntu into Bengali, but the specified fonts
were not selected in sans / serif... any test results on this?

Cheers
Arne
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