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>)
- Gargi_1.7.ttf (ttf-devanagari-fonts)
- chandas1-1.ttf (ttf-devanagari-fonts)
- lohit_hi.ttf (ttf-devanagari-fonts)
- Saab.ttf (ttf-punjabi-fonts)
- lohit_pa.ttf (ttf-punjabi-fonts)
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:
[http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=341229 #341229] (ATM the bug is fixed, but it's safer to make sure all languages are OK before closing it), [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=342239 #342239]
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. [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-farsiweb ttf-farsiweb] is maintained by Clint Adams, but Arash Bijanzadeh, the Persian translation coordinator is ready to take it over as Clint wants to orphan the package. ChristianPerrier will help him in this process.
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).
- sazanami-gothic.ttf
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:
UnDotum.ttf
UnDotumBold.ttf
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. The [http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/ttf-dejavu Debian package] has been updated to version 2.1. There is no udeb yet: 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).
[be] Belarusian
[bg] Bulgarian
[kk] Kazakh
[mk] Macedonian
[ru] Russian
[sr] Serbian
[uk] Ukrainian