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

[Jonas Smedegaard]

X-Debbugs-Cc: konomikitten at gmail.com

Hi Konomi,

Quoting Konomi Kitten (2022-04-08 21:21:08)
> 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].

To me this sounds like an issue in Wine, not in this font.

I mean, if an application chooses to load a _fallback_ font without 
first trying other fonts that contains Latin1 characters, then it sounds 
like that application is not really using that font as intended.


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

I am not convinced: It is true that Google no longer need that font, but 
that fact in itself is not a reason for Debian to stop using it.

If you meant to imply some underlying reason for Debian avoiding the 
Droid font, then please elaborate.


> 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.

The purpose of Droid Sans Fallback is to provide a *lighweight* 
fallback.

If you want rich coverage, then instead use Noto.

If you want medium coverage, then instead use a subset of Noto.

If an application cannot choose another font, then... That's a bug in 
that application, and it seems very wrong to me to change the font or 
every other package to try play along with that.

Sorry if I am missing something here - then please try elaborate.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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