[Pkg-fonts-devel] Fwd: [i18n] Input Method and Fonts improvements for Gutsy

Tue Aug 7 07:05:20 UTC 2007

Quoting Daniel Glassey (wdg at debian.org):
> Hi,
> I think it would be good to discuss this with Debian folks at well to
> share their expertise and I think these issues should be addressed for
> lenny as well.

And, given that this highly involves packages beings installed by
default, this should be discussed with the D-I team as such default
installations should be handled by tasksel in Debian.

(please note that Ubuntu does not use tasksel and, therefore,
solutions suitable for Ubuntu will, there, not be suitable for Debian
and vice-versa)

> 
> Regards,
> Daniel

So, original message by Arne Goetje, forwarded by Daniel Glassey:

> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Arne Goetje <arne.goetje at canonical.com>
> Date: 06-Aug-2007 18:15
> Subject: [i18n] Input Method and Fonts improvements for Gutsy
> To: ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
> 
> 
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> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I have taken a first look at the current font and input method situation
> in Gutsy (Tribe 3 Live CD and up to date installation on HDD) and have a
> few suggestions to make.
> 
> 1. Input Method (SCIM):
> Both Live CD and default installation come with the SCIM package
> installed, however it is not properly set up, so that the user actually
> cannot use it.
> SCIM depends on some environment variables and the SCIM demon started in
> the background. There is a nice tool, called im-switch, which takes care
> of this.
> The purpose of im-switch is to give the user a simple frontend to choose
> which input method program (s)he wants to use. For most users with
> non-Latin based alphabets, this should be SCIM, as it clearly supports
> most languages and scripts. However, some Asian users might prefer a
> different application, like IIIMF or gcin (especially in Taiwan).
> im-switch will take a parameter, whether or not it should do the setting
> system wide or in the user scope only, and the name of the input method
> framework.
> 
> So, for making SCIM the system wide default, the following should be
> done on the Live CD and in the default installation:
> 1. install and configure scim and its modules

I think that this should be done by default when installs are done for
non european languages, at least those that are supported by SCIM
(CJK? Indic languages? Other Asian languages? Cyrillic?)

> 2. install im-switch

Ditto

> 3. run as root:
>         im-switch -s scim
> After a relogin, the user can toggle SCIM on/off by pressing CRTL+SPACE.

"im-switch -s scim" should be done once on the installed system, or at
every boot?

> 
> 
> 2. SCIM modules:
> The default installed scim module packages are:
>  * scim-modules-table
>  * scim-tables-additional (Russian and Indic IMs)

Could go in the -desktop tasks for Indic and Cyrillic langs

> I highly recommend, that we put the following packages and their
> dependencies into the Live CD and the default installation to make it
> become more useful:
>  * scim-anthy or scim-prime: Japanese input methods, scim-prime is a
> dictionary based IM, which has a great advantage over anthy. Although
> both are widely used in Japan.

Ditto for japanese-desktop

>  * scim-chewing: Traditional Chinese phonetic IM, widely used in Taiwan

ditto for chinese-t-desktop (already done, indeed)

>  * scim-pinyin: Simplified and Traditional Chinese Pinyin IM, widely
> used in China and by foreigners in Taiwan. ;)

ditto for chinese-t-desktop and  chinese-s-desktop

>  * scim-hangul: As the name says it - Korean.

ditto for korean-desktop

>  * scim-tables-zh: additional table based IMs for Simplified and
> Traditional Chinese, many of them are popular in China, Hong Kong and
> Taiwan.

ditto for chinese-t-desktop and  chinese-s-desktop

>  * scim-thai: well, Thai. :)

ditto for thai-desktop

>  * scim-m17n: bridge to the m17n library, which adds a lot of additional
>  IMs, including Latin based ones for the European languages with
> diacritics. (not everyone likes to fiddle with XKB settings. ;) )

hmmm, seeing this makes me think that, after all, scim could be
installed by default on all desktop installs, and scim-m17n added to
*-desktop tasks for Latin-based languages.

> 
> The following packages may NOT be installed:
>  * scim-uim: BROKEN, will trash the SCIM setup tool. Don't install it.
>  * scim-chinese: old version of scim-pinyin, not compatible with the
> current scim package; breaks dependency handling.
> 
> 
> 3. Fonts:
>  a) language selector:

All these things seem more Ubuntu-specific (related to the Ubuntu
liveCD which, afaik, never made its way back into Debian...)

I leave the remaining of the mail (as I added -boot to the CC list)
but don't have much comments. It is full of good ideas, which could
also benefit the installer.

> The idea with the language selector handling the fontconfig
> configuration is nice, however, it needs some tweaking:
>  * more languages: I will add more config files for more locales; needs
> some testing and probably some community feedback.
>  * Question: how to handle those config files which come with the font
> packages? Font preference handling should be done by language selector,
> while font specific options can remain the the config files installed by
> the font packages? If that's the case, we need to check all the font
> packages and tweak those where it's not the case.
> 
>  b) Font packages:
> I see a problem: space on the Live CD is a bit "restricted"... but some
> font packages come with multiple fonts inside and install them all, even
> if we don't need them. This wastes precious space.
> I'm still trying to get an overview about which fonts cover which
> Unicode ranges and which fonts should be taken into account for the
> three Alias fonts "sans-serif", "serif" and "monospace".
> Bottom line: Some font packages come with fonts we don't need for this
> purpose. Question: how to handle this?
> 
> Option 1: We craft a seperate package, just for the Live CD and put
> selected fonts from the other font packages together, just for this
> single purpose.
> Caveat: might conflict with the other font packages (duplicate fonts
> files), should probably not be used on the default installation on the
> users' harddisks.
> 
> Option 2: We split the font packages into 2: a "base" package with the
> fonts we need for the Live CD and an "extra" package, where the rest of
> the fonts are in.
> Caveat: it's not always easy to draw the line which font should be in
> base and which ones in extra. Users might get confused.
> 
> I would probably prefer option 1... less work, if we can restrict it to
> the Live CD only.
> 
>  c) rendering issue in Chinese locale environment:
> This might be a bug in my chinese font package, I will take care of this
> and provide a new package for Gutsy.
> 
> 4. Improvements for Gutsy+1
> I expect that we don't have enough time to implement these improvements
> into Gutsy, therefor we should probably postpone them for the next release:
>  a) Language selector:
> It would be useful, if the user could have an Advanced button in the
> language selector, where (s)he can adjust his/her preferred fonts and
> translation order. Just like you have a list of available fonts and you
> move them up or down according to your own preference. And the same
> should be possible for translations:
> 
> There are users who live in a foreign country and whose language ability
> is not good enough to use that country's locale settings, but use their
> native language instead. However, they need to use their host country's
> writing system.
> 
> Take me as example: I'm from Germany, but live in Taiwan. On my computer
> I prefer en_US as my default locale, but need to display Chinese
> characters probably. Therefor I prefer the Arphic font over the Baekmuk
> or Kochi fonts.
> Another foreigner living in Japan, might have the same issue but prefers
> the Kochi font over the Arphic and Baekmuk ones.
> 
> There are also users who depend on translations, but sometimes meet the
> situation, that a translation is not available in their native language.
> The default fallback is English. But maybe that user is not very good in
> understanding English and prefers a different fallback language, or set
> of languages: For example, a Taiwanese user who uses Traditional
> Chinese, might prefer Simplified Chinese and then Japanese as fallback
> and not English.
> 
> So: have a Advanced button in the language selector, which pops up a new
> window with two Tabs: one for setting the preferred fonts and one for
> translation fallbacks.
> 
>  b) CJK fonts:
> This topic really is... erm... difficult.
> For the Arphic fonts (and probably also a Heiti (sans-serif, like DejaVu
> Sans) and Yuanti (rounded, like Kochi Gothic) font) I have the following
> in mind:
> The problem is, that many characters share the same codepoint in
> Unicode, but have a different shape (number of strokes and stroke order)
> in the different CJK regions (China, Hong Kong / Macao, Taiwan, Japan,
> Korea). This is one of the main reasons why users in these regions
> prefer different fonts.
> My approach would be to put all character shape variants into a single
> TTC (TrueType Collection) and use a different glyph ID to Unicode
> codepoint mapping for each "virtual font".
> Instead of having 5 separate TTF files, each about 25MB in size, we
> would end up with only one TTC file (about 30 MB in size), which
> produces 5 "virtual fonts". Saves a lot of space. ;)
> 
> (If you need more details about this technology, I can elaborate about
> it in a follow up mail)
> 
> Caveat: QT3 does not support TTC fonts. GTK2 however has no problem with
> it. QT4 >= 4.3 is also able to use them.
> So, I basically wait until KDE4 is released and adopted into Ubuntu.
> Otherwise KDE users can't use the TTC fonts.
> 
> That's it for the moment, if you have some opinion about one of these
> issues, please speak up. :)
> 
> Cheers
> Arne
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