[Pkg-fonts-devel] sharing same family name (noto, fantasque)

[Adam Borowski]

On Tue, Jan 02, 2018 at 03:01:48AM +0100, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting Adam Borowski (2018-01-01 23:19:18)
> > The second is Noto: currently, it takes about half the list in a font 
> > picker on my desktop, as it's split into a separate family for every 
> > single Unicode block (Noto Sans Ogham, Noto Sans Ol Chiki, Noto Sans 
> > Runic, ...).
> > 
> > Thus, I wonder: what would happen if all Noto pieces were changed to 
> > share the family -- would fontconfig do the right thing?  I don't 
> > think there is a reason for an user to pick one Noto piece over the 
> > other -- being split into many files is an implementation detail.
> 
> Quoting /usr/share/doc/fonts-noto/FAQ.md.gz of fonts-noto:
> 
> > ### Could you provide a single font file that covers every language 
> > (or at least as many scripts as possible)?
> >
> > A single file is not possible, because there are many more glyphs in 
> > Noto than can fit into a single font. CJK alone is as large as it can 
> > get. In addition, different scripts prefer different line metrics. 
> > Noto tries to provide suitable line metrics for each script rather 
> > than forcing all scripts to fit one. The UI fonts are an exception to 
> > this, however, so using them we could g enerate a single font sharing 
> > a single line height. However, we are working on a possible 
> > repackaging of the fonts into a few files. We can probably get one for 
> > CJK, one for common scripts in living languages, and one for obscure 
> > scripts-- depends if Tangut pushes us over the limit of what non-CJK 
> > we can fit into a single font. There are tools that can be used to 
> > merge fonts but the devil is in the details-- some common characters 
> > are in a few source fonts and if they behave differently we'd have to 
> > work that out.

Yeah, but I'm wondering not about files but the "family name" field.

A fontconfig using program (ie, the vast majority of what Debian provides)
presents the user with a list of fonts based on this field.  While most
families keep to 1-3 variants, Noto has an enormous number of distinct
"family name" values, that, on the desktop I'm typing these words on, gives
it about as many entries as all other fonts I have installed together.
This makes searching for a font that's _not_ Noto pretty tedious, especially
with a bad font picker (GTK3, I'm looking at you!).

The individual font files seem to have almost no overlap; at a cursory look
the major groups are just "Noto Sans", "Noto Sans UI", "Noto Serif", plus
tiny one-file "Noto Sans Mono".

Thus, it would be nice for user interfaces to list just these four, leaving
loading individual files hidden as a technical detail.


Meow!
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