Fonts configuration for the G-I

Infos for language codes were fetched from:

Latin-1

Base characters (Latin) are taken from ttf-freefont (existing udeb). This font was selected because it looks quite good, has a character set that gives good support for a lot of languages and was already packaged as an udeb.

A negative aspect is that it also has partial/limited/ugly support for other scripts/languages and it would be better to only have specialized fonts for those. This is being resolved by "stripping" all glyphs from the font which we want to take from other fonts.

We also only really need the FreeSans* variants of freefont, and not everything that is currently in the udeb.

[ca] Catalan

[da] Danish

[de] German

[en] English

[es] Spanish

[eu] Basque

[fi] Finnish

[fr] French

[ga] Irish

[gl] Gallegan

[is] Icelandic

[it] Italian

[nb] Norwegian Bokmal

[nl] Dutch

[nn] Norwegian Nynorsk

[pt] Portuguese

[pt_BR] Portuguese (Brazil)

[sq] Albanian

[sv] Swedish

Latin-other

These are also covered by ttf-freefont.

[bs] Bosnian

[cs] Czech

[cy] Welsh

[eo] Esperanto

[et] Estonian

[hu] Hungarian

[id] Indonesian

[ku] Kurdish

[lv] Latvian

[lt] Lithuanian

[mg] Malagasy

[pl] Polish

[ro] Romanian

[hr] Croatian

[se] Sami

[sk] Slovakian

[sl] Slovenian

[tl] Tagalog

[tr] Turkish

[vi] Vietnamese

[wo] Wolof

Display is correct with ttf-freefont, even the "ŋ" characters

[xh] Xhosa

Non-Latin scripts

Greek script

[el] Greek

In principle ttf-freefont will be used.

Hebrew script

[he] Hebrew

In principle ttf-freefont will be used, which was [http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/12/msg00511.html approved by Lior Kaplan].

Indic family scripts

For Indic languages we currently include fonts from [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-devanagari-fonts ttf-devanagari-fonts] and [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-punjabi-fonts ttf-punjabi-fonts] (both maintained by Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>)

Bengali script (Brahmic family)

[bn] Bengali

There was [http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/12/msg00338.html a report] stating that Bengali does not look right. [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=343446 #343446] tries to analyze the problem.

Devanagari script

[hi] Hindi

[ne] Nepali

Nepali uses the Devanagari script. Paras pradhan recommends using Garki_1.7.ttf.

Gurmukhi script

[pa_IN] Punjabi (Gumurkhi)

Khmer script

[km] Khmer

The [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-khmeros ttf-khmeros] font should be used.

Malayalam script

[ml] Malayalam

Malayalam has a script of his own. Vivek Varghese Cherian recommends using Racotf04.ttf. This font is not packaged yet. The suggestion to package it has been sent to Soumyadip Modak who maintains [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-indic-fonts ttf-indic-fonts], the source package for [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-malayalam-fonts ttf-malayalam-fonts]. While waiting for this, ?RachanaMedium.ttf from the [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-malayalam-fonts ttf-malayalam-fonts] package can be used.

Arabic scripts

[ar] Arabic

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

Package: [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/debian-installer/ttf-arabeyes-udeb ttf-arabeyes-udeb] (maintained by Mohammed Adnène Trojette <adn+deb@diwi.org>)

The udeb includes "ae_AlMohanad.ttf"; as an alternative we've experimented a tarball containig "ae_Tholoth.ttf". "ae_AlMohanad.ttf" is said to produce better visual results.

See:

Needs to be checked now that ttf-freefont has been stripped.

[fa] Persian

Glyphs are shared with Arabic; "ae_AlMohanad.ttf" seem to have problems especially with ligatures; we need to see if "ae_Tholoth.ttf" works better. Roozbeh Pournader, upstream maintainer of [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-farsiweb ttf-farsiweb] fonts, recommends using the nazli.ttf font from the [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-farsiweb ttf-farsiweb] package. He discourages the use of ae_Tholoth.ttf.

Chinese/Japanese/Korean scripts

For Chinese and Japanese we currently use the fonts prepared by Kenshi Muto (ttf-compact-fonts). For an overview, see [http://people.debian.org/~kmuto/d-i/cjk/cjk.html this page].

[zh_CN] Chinese (Simplified)

[zh_TW] Chinese (Traditional)

[ja] Japanese

For Japanese, Kenshi and Hidetaka recommend Sazanami-Gothic (ttf-sazanami-gothic).

Complete ttf is quite big, but a stripped ttf is about 160KB.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/12/msg00150.html

Chinese and Japanese have `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.

[ko] Korean

For Korean we now use [http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/12/msg00150.htm 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

[http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page ?DejaVu fonts] is based on Bitstream Vera and their recent releases have good cyrilic coverage. However the [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/ttf-dejavu Debian package] is stuck at a pretty old version, because the new versions need a newer version of [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/fontforge fontforge] to build. (On the other hand, Ubuntu built ttf-dejavu 2.1 with the old fontforge, it seems to work fine, so maybe Debian can do that too, someone need to talk with the Debian ttf-dejavu maintainer.) This can be worked around by using the TTF files released by upstream, instead of building from the SFD source files (the rationale of the current practice is probably everything should be built from real source).

A NMU for fontforge has been prepared by ChristianPerrier on Dec 31st 2005 and will reach unstable on January 3rd as it was uploaded to the delayed queue. As soon as it is in unstable, we can ask peter Cernak to build the new ttf-dejavu fonts.

[be] Belarusian

[bg] Bulgarian

[kk] Kazakh

[mk] Macedonian

[ru] Russian

[sr] Serbian

[uk] Ukrainian