[Mageia-dev] new fonts?

Tue Sep 25 16:53:28 CEST 2012

On Monday 24 Sep 2012 14:12:53 Liam R E Quin wrote:
+
+> > Are the Liberation Font's UTF8 Complete?
+> 
+> Strictly speaking UTF-8 is an encoding, a way of representing 32-bit
+> integers in as few bytes (octets) as possible while still working with
+> text tools; those 32-bit integers are Unicode "codepoints", indices into
+> a table of characters published by the Unicode Consortium. Currently the
+> table actually only needs I think 18 bits (more than 16 and less than 24
+> at any rate), but is still growing.
+> 
+> 
+> However, asking for a single typeface to have a unified design for
+> Vietnamese, Hindi, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese,
+> English, French, Czech, Cree, ... is a tall order. You'd also have a
+> rather large font file (probably between 500M and a gigabyte).
+> 
+> So, the best approach is to choose smaller fonts that work OK with each
+> other and give the best coverage.
+
+Thanks for the explanation.
+
+> 
+> Hope this helps. I responded to more than your question to try & help
+> others see the issues too :-)
+
+Thinking about it my underlying questions are...
+
+1) how do Magia ensure that all new installs get the right default fonts?
+Including installs where the user needs characters not supported by 
+Liberation.
+
+2) as a user I don't like to see incoming emails / web pages with blobs 
+replacing missing characters.
+At least if the character is there I can always shove it through Google 
+translate. 
+
+