Changing the default font in Fedora Core 6

[Roozbeh Pournader]

روز دوشنبه، 2006-06-12 ساعت 16:34 +0200، Nicolas Mailhot نوشت:
> On hindsight, Farsi speakers probably systematically make FarsiWeb fonts
> their defaults (I don't know where they download their fonts from), so
> maybe I shouldn't have bothered with this.

Ah! I got you now. You are talking about FarsiWeb's Unicode Persian
fonts:
http://www.farsiweb.ir/wiki/Persian_fonts

There is a bug about getting some of them into Core somewhere, but I
don't have the number at hand. Behdad may.

I personally use the FarsiWeb Persian fonts of course, and yes, I can
confirm that I uninstalled dejavu-fonts from my box after I found that
it has added Arabic glyphs.

> BTW at some point in time after doing arabic for arab countries DejaVu
> will probably do Arabic for Farsi, so if FarsiWeb people want to be
> involved either as glyph authors or as glyph reviewers they are welcome.

I assume that you know that mixing Arabic and LGC (Latin, Greek,
Cyrillic, and the typographically compatible scripts) in a single font
is not really recommended by Pango and fontconfig authors. It is
complicated and in order to work needs several obscure opentype features
specified in the font and supported in the engine (pango).

To quote Owen Taylor: "Note that putting Arabic into DejaVu Sans is a
shockingly bad idea, and I don't think it's worth even thinking about
investigating problems with it. (The main reason it's a horrid idea is
that Arabic fonts and Latin fonts don't have compatible metrics.)"
[http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334758#c20]

Freefont is a famous example of why putting everything in is bad. I
recall Keith Packard on the IRC telling that he was even thinking of
blacklisting FreeFont in fontconfig's default settings.

So if DejaVu is thinking about a *separate* Arabic font, I wish it luck,
but as someone who considers himself an expert in the Arabic script I
believe that having something that works even minimally right for the
three typographic traditions of the Arabic script, that are Arabic,
Persian and Afghan Pashto, and Urdu, Sindhi, and Pakistani Pashto is
very hard and needs a font designer familiar with the typographic
traditions of these.

DejaVu started with Latin designs from Vera. You'll need something
similar to Vera for Arabic to start with.

> If DejaVu has strong cyrillic and greek blocks that's because the greek
> and cyrillic communities got involved at one point. The blocks weren't
> born perfect.

Well, Greek and Cyrillic are typographically compatible with Latin.
Arabic is not.

roozbeh