[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#1009198: fonts-droid-fallback: English text broken when running programs via wine that use both Japanese and Latin characters

[Konomi Kitten]

Package: fonts-droid-fallback
Version: 1:6.0.1r16-1.1
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream
X-Debbugs-Cc: konomikitten at gmail.com

Currently if you have fonts-droid-fallback installed and run a program via
wine that uses both Japanese characters and Latin characters you will get
tofu characters for English (squares) [Broken Characters.png]. Removing the
fonts-droid-fallback package fixes this problem [Working Characters.png].
This seems to occur because the font provided in fonts-droid-fallback
(DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf) lacks Latin characters. This can easily be
observed with Font Viewer by selecting Lorem Ipsum [Lorem Ipsum.png].

This problem only affects wine and may be due to wine partially supporting
Uniscribe [1]. There's a few ways to go about fixing this issue though.

First of all Google has abandoned the droid font [2] so it could be argued that
the font should be removed from Debian.

Another option is to go back to older versions of the font where Latin
characters were present at some point in time Google removed a significant
amount of characters from the droid font. I believe this change occurred in
commit 034b20c102ee2e7ec1da09e2b080f35be4a5cf54 [3]. So going back to
commit 0abd8a79cc19658305dae81e3eca32b45f268f96 [4] would restore many
of the missing characters.

Another option would be to change all packages recommending
fonts-droid-fallback to suggesting it instead so it's not installed by
default.

Ultimately though these are just suggestions because I am unable to figure
out why wine cannot handle DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf's lack of Latin
characters.

[1] https://wiki.winehq.org/Uniscribe
[2] https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/1223
[3]
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/034b20c102ee2e7ec1da09e2b080f35be4a5cf54
[4]
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/0abd8a79cc19658305dae81e3eca32b45f268f96


-- Package-specific info:
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name               Version       Architecture Description
+++-==================-=============-============-=====================================================
ii  fontconfig         2.13.1-4.4    amd64        generic font configuration library - support binaries
ii  libfreetype6:amd64 2.11.1+dfsg-1 amd64        FreeType 2 font engine, shared library files
ii  libfreetype6:i386  2.11.1+dfsg-1 i386         FreeType 2 font engine, shared library files
ii  libxft2:amd64      2.3.4-1       amd64        FreeType-based font drawing library for X

-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.16.0-6-amd64 (SMP w/12 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_AU:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages fonts-droid-fallback depends on:
ii  dpkg  1.21.7

Versions of packages fonts-droid-fallback recommends:
ii  fonts-noto-mono  20201225-1

Versions of packages fonts-droid-fallback suggests:
ii  fonts-noto  20201225-1

-- no debconf information