Bug#1029707: Maybe set DejaVu Sans Mono as default font for Arabic

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

On 2023-01-26 15:50, Simon McVittie wrote:
> * "Monospace" is a fontconfig alias intended to point to a generic monospace
>    font, which until recently was resolved to DejaVu Sans Mono by
>    fontconfig. Since the recent upgrade to fontconfig 2.14, "Monospace"
>    now prefers Noto Sans Mono instead, if available.

That detail made me curious. I suppose it's related to this commit:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/fontconfig/fontconfig/-/commit/ad70d785

Which is not only about monospace, but affects most Debian users, also 
for sans-serif and serif, and also for web browsing, since 
fonts-noto-core is installed by default (probably due to the meta 
package libreoffice).

That's a pretty radical change to come from fontconfig upstream. Hello 
Noto, goodbye DejaVu. Was it even discussed anywhere?

Ubuntu does not install the libreoffice meta package and fonts-noto-core 
by default, at least not yet. But the new version of 60-latin.conf will 
be noticed also in Ubuntu: As soon as you install fonts-noto-core for 
some reason, your main font for web browsing will be switched from 
DejaVu to Noto.

Personally I think it's a step in the right direction. Using Noto as 
default font opens doors to much easier handling of font configuration 
for several non-latin languages. And that would be even easier if the 
packaging of fonts-noto-core could be split, so we at least separate the 
basic latin fonts from the rest. (But this gnome-terminal bug is really 
the wrong place to talk about that.)

-- 
Gunnar