Bad or non implemented Greek (and other) fonts?

[Mikko Paananen]

pe, 2004-03-26 kello 16:14, Roland Wolters kirjoitti:
> Once upon a time Roland Wolters wrote:
> > I try to get all the fonts on my linux which I need to read Greek or other
> > non-latin sites without any problems.
> > But there are several problems: it seems that fedora comes with a basic
> > Greek font, but its far away from correct displaying Greek
> > (http://el.wikipedia.org/).
> > And Hindi is not supported in any way, its impossible to read hindi with
> > Fedora Core 2 Test1 as long as you do not try to fix by hand.

Most fonts don't have all characters needed to display greek correctly.
European Union has defined subset of Unicode (MES-2) needed to display
102 languages spoken in europe correctly, it includes 1062 different
glyphs. Most font don't have near to that amount. Microsoft's own subset
WGL4 (Arial, Verdana, ..) has only 650 letters, leaving out accented
greek etc.

The problem with X fonts is that those are bitmap fonts, not scalable
ttf/opetype, and are not used by gnome/kde by default. There are least
two free fontsets with recent character repertoire, freefont
(http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/freefont/) and TeX fonts converted
to truetype. Savannah download site seem to still empty after crack, but
I have a rpm here: http://ipi.fi/~mikko/repo/freefont-1.0-3.noarch.rpm.
Also TeX cm fonts in ttf:
http://ipi.fi/~mikko/repo/cm-unicode-ttf-0.1.2-1.noarch.rpm

If you install those fonts, you should be able to view least greek
correctly.

Hindi etc., however is written with alphabet called devanagari
so get fonts here: http://www.indlinux.org/downloads/

Also, you have to recompile Mozilla cvs version to display it correctly,
read this message (and thread) for discussion:
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-utf8@nl.linux.org/msg04483.html
It seems that software support for complex scripts in Mozilla is not
there yet.

> > Why don't they add the missing files? It seems that XFree86 and X.org are
> > having the files they need, following Markus Kuhn at
> > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html
> >
> > Linux do not need all the UTF-8 support as long as its not able to display
> > some of the "large" fonts/alphabets (hindi and greek) from start on - I
> > know that I can fix it by hand, but thats not the question for the "normal"
> > users.

Freefonts & TeX fonts are not very nice on screen, if you need readable
(western) unicode font, google for "Gentium", it's free download. Also,
get "Cyberbit" for non-latin scripts.