Intro

One of the main advantages of the graphical version of the installer is that it can support languages that use combining characters. We are currently using only TTF fonts.

The following issues are open with respect to fonts:

Requirements for packaging fonts

Davide Viti created a fontforge script, that will allow stripping unnecessary glyphs or glyph ranges from the fonts. If needed, one can read the usage hints.

Information on how to play around with fonts is included in DebianInstaller/GUIBuild.


Fonts configuration for the G-I

Infos for language codes were fetched from:

Font packages currently used:

Color codes below:

Latin-1

Base characters (Latin) are taken from fonts-dejavu (existing udeb).

Lang Code

Language Name

Current Font pkg

Other Fonts pkg

Status / Observations

br

Breton

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

ca

Catalan

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

ca@valencia

Valencian-Catalan

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

da

Danish

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

de

German

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

en

English

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

es

Spanish

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

eu

Basque

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

fi

Finnish

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

fr

French

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

ga

Irish

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

gl

Galician

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

id

Indonesian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

is

Icelandic

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

it

Italian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

ms

Malay

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

Language is not supported yet but uses only ASCII characters

nb

Norwegian Bokmal

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

nl

Dutch

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

nn

Norwegian Nynorsk

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

pt

Portuguese

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

pt_BR

Portuguese (Brazil)

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

sq

Albanian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

sv

Swedish

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

tl

Tagalog

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

xh

Xhosa

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

Latin-other

These are also covered by fonts-dejavu.

Lang Code

Language Name

Current Font pkg

Other Fonts pkg

Status / Observations

ast

Asturian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

bs

Bosnian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

cs

Czech

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

cy

Welsh

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

eo

Esperanto

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

et

Estonian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

hu

Hungarian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

ku

Kurdish

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

lv

Latvian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

lt

Lithuanian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

mg

Malagasy

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

pl

Polish

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

ro

Romanian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

hr

Croatian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

se

Sami

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

sk

Slovak

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

sl

Serbian (Latin)

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

sl

Slovenian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

tr

Turkish

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

ok

vi

Vietnamese

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont;HanNomSet,TriChlorSet

The licenses for HanNomSet have not been studied. TriChlorSet is "all rights reserved".

wo

Wolof

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

Display is correct with fonts-freefont, even the "ŋ" characters; dejavu state is unknown

Non-Latin scripts

Armenian script

Lang Code

Language Name

Current Font pkg

Other Fonts pkg

Status / Observations

hy

Armenian

fonts-dejavu

Language not yet in the installer

Georgian script

Lang Code

Language Name

Current Font pkg

Other Fonts pkg

Status / Observations

ka

Georgian

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont, ttf-bpg-georgian-fonts

Udeb OK

Greek script

Lang Code

Language Name

Current Font pkg

Other Fonts pkg

Status / Observations

el

Greek

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

With fonts-freefont, Greek is a little blurred but ok: see this thread

Hebrew script

Lang Code

Language Name

Current Font pkg

Other Fonts pkg

Status / Observations

he

Hebrew

fonts-dejavu

fonts-freefont

OK for translator

Indic family scripts

Lang Code

Language Name

Script

Current Font pkg

Other Font pkg

Status / Observations

bn

Bengali

Bengali

fonts-freefont

ttf-bengali-fonts

?MuktiNarrow in ttf-bengali-fonts recommended by translators (udeb requested with 375475)

gu

Gujarati

Gujarati

fonts-freefont

ttf-gujarati-fonts

hi

Hindi

Devanagari

fonts-freefont

ttf-devanagari-fonts

Gargi_1.7.ttf in ttf-devanagari-fonts also possible.

kn

Kannada

Kannada

fonts-knda

Uses Kannada script. Kadige-* in ttf-kannada-fonts suggested by indlinux contributors.

ml

Malayalam

Malayalam

fonts-mlym

Rachana_w01.otf is used.

mr

Marathi

Devanagari

fonts-freefont

ttf-devanagari-fonts

Gargi_1.7.ttf in ttf-devanagari-fonts also possible

ne

Nepali

Devanagari

fonts-freefont

ttf-devanagari-fonts

Gargi_1.7.ttf in ttf-devanagari-fonts recommended by Paras pradhan

pa

Punjabi

Gurmukhi

fonts-freefont

ttf-punjabi-fonts

Saab.ttf of lohit_pa.ttf from ttf-punjabi-fonts also possible (soumyadip: well I was reading somewhere that AnmolUni was better) - this font should be (apparently) in ttf-punjabi-fonts, but is not currently (1:0.4.7)

sa

Sanskrit

Devanagari

fonts-freefont

ttf-devanagari-fonts

Language not yet in the installer

si

Sinhala

Sinhala

fonts-noto-hinted

ta

Tamil

Tamil

fonts-taml

TSCu_Paranar in ttf-tamil-fonts

te

Telugu

Telugu

fonts-telu

Pothana2000 suggested by translator.

ks

Kashmiri

Devanagari

fonts-freefont

ttf-devanagari-fonts

Gargi_1.7.ttf in ttf-devanagari-fonts also possible. Doubts about complete support in Freefont. It seems that Kashmiri has special glyphs wrt other Devanagari-based languages. See [ http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/Draft/kashmiri_draft.html that link] for more details

Resources: #indlinux IRC channel on irc.freenode.net and eventually < debian-in-workers@lists.alioth.debian.org >

There was a report stating that Bengali does not look right. 343446 tries to analyze the problem.

Bengali: Mukti Narrow looks great, but there is some more stripping to be done (apparently) because this font is silently overridden by freefont (probably). (by silent I mean that "fc-list :lang:bn" does not list nothing other than Mukti, but the installer uses something else, anyway). Update: 343446 confirms that ?MuktiNarrow should be used. Although freefont has support for Bengali, it seems that there are still some problems.

Ethiopic script

Lang Code

Language Name

Current Font pkg

Other Fonts pkg

Status / Observations

am

Amharic

fonts-sil-abyssinica

Abyssinica_SIL to be used.

Tibeto-Burman family scripts

Lang Code

Language Name

Current Font pkg

Other Font pkg

Status / Observations

dz

Dzongkha

fonts-tibetan-machine

ttf-dzongkha

udeb OK

South-East Asian scripts

Lang Code

Language Name

Current Font pkg

Other Font pkg

Status / Observations

km

Khmer

fonts-khmeros

KhmerOSsys.ttf udeb OK

lo

Lao

fonts-dejavu

ttf-lao

Font named Phetsarath (ttf-lao)

my

Burmese

fonts-sil-padauk

Translators recommend a font named Myanmar3 from [http://www.myanmarnlp.net.mm/ MyanmarNLP]. Needs to be packaged. padauk can be used in the meantime

th

Thai

fonts-thai-tlwg

none

Font named Loma. udeb OK

Arabic scripts

Lang Code

Language Name

Current Font pkg

Other Fonts pkg

Status / Observations

ar

Arabic

fonts-farsiweb

fonts-arabeyes

Font named Nazli ae_AlMohanad from ttf-arabeyes also possible

fa

Persian

fonts-farsiweb

Font named Nazli

sd

Sindhi

Translator recommends Scheherazade from fonts-sil-scheherazade. udeb requested through 660819. Language not yet in the installer

ur

Urdu

fonts-nafees

fonts-paktype

Font named ?NafeesWeb. Language not yet in the installer

ug

Uyghur

fonts-ukij-uyghur

Font named UKIJ Tuz Tom

udeb OK

Resources: #arabeyes IRC channel on irc.freenode.net

Chinese/Japanese/Korean scripts

Lang Code

Language Name

Current Font pkg

Other Fonts pkg

Status / Observations

ja

Japanese

fonts-android

ko

Korean

fonts-android

zh_CN

Chinese (Simplified)

fonts-android

zh_TW

Chinese (Traditional)

fonts-android

We no longer use ttf-cjk-compact-udeb for CJK for some time now!

Following are historical information for CJK languages, no longer up-to-date:

Japanese: Sazanami-Gothic recommended. A stripped ttf is about 160KB. Still there is a issue with the kana and kanji glyphs which are not well mixed for Japanese. Kenshi Muto confirmed personally that the issue is present. No solution for this problem, yet.

Korean: Korean fonts are taken from UnDotum confirmed OK by translator

For Chinese and Japanese we currently use the fonts prepared by Kenshi Muto (ttf-compact-fonts). For an overview, see this page.

We should make sure that none of the fonts below provides glyphs for other scripts than the ones which they were introduced (currently there are latin glyphs provided by them which take up space and harm us a lot for latin scripts).

Chinese and Japanese have an unification problem. Unicode defines same codepoint against different glyphs between Japanese/Chinese(/Korean, but the Korean translation does not use any glyphs from this Unified Ideographs region so Korean is free from this issue). Furthermore Chinese font face and Japanese font face are different (do you think Helvetica and NewCentury are same? :-P ). So they don't like to use them together.

For Korean we now use ttf-compact-fonts, which has stripped UnDotum.ttf from ttf-unfonts (maintained by Changwoo Ryu < cwryu@debian.org >)

We previous included complete ttfs, but these took a lot of space:

We did have report stating that the UnDotum looked right: http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/11/msg01409.html

Cyrillic scripts

Lang Code

Language Name

Current Font pkg

Other Fonts pkg

Status / Observations

be

Belarusian

fonts-dejavu

bg

Bulgarian

fonts-dejavu

ky

Kirghiz

fonts-dejavu

Language not yet in the installer

kk

Kazakh

fonts-dejavu

mk

Macedonian

fonts-dejavu

os

Ossetian

fonts-dejavu

Language not yet in the installer

ru

Russian

fonts-dejavu

sr

Serbian

fonts-dejavu

tg

Tajik

fonts-dejavu

uk

Ukrainian

fonts-dejavu

Creating screenshots

As a prerequisite your machine must have been started with support for framebuffer

You can take a screenshoot for Italian language:

$ ./gtk_font_tester it.txt  800 600
$  mv /var/log/test_0.png /var/log/it.png

or if you want to take a screenshot for all supported languages (script available here: take_shots.sh):

$ take_shots.sh

It's now possible to leave the chroot (CTRL-d) and see the pictures inside tree/var/log