Re: Default font: Transition from DejaVu to Noto

On Sun, 10 Sept 2023 at 02:57, Gunnar Hjalmarsson <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hi!
>
> With fontconfig 2.14, which entered testing last January, upstream
> fontconfig prefers Noto over DejaVu in /etc/fonts/conf.d/60-latin.conf.
> The change was not preceded by any discussion I'm aware of. It appears
> to be related to this Fedora measure:
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultToNotoFonts
>
> So Debian was kind of caught off guard.
>
>
This is in line with the consistent pattern of making changes without much
user consultation in that world.

Seems change relates to giving a consistent look n feel, by using the same
font family across scripts.

Since its been a while since this mail , I only want to respond to specific
example picked.


> My personal view is that it is a change in the right direction, and I
> have taken a couple of follow-up steps in Debian. There are still loose
> ends and more work to be done to achieve a consistent configuration in
> this respect. However, before taking further steps, I feel there is a
> need to reach out to a broader audience about the change. Hence this
> message. Basically I'm asking if this move towards Noto is desirable
> and, if so, I plea for relevant input for the completion of the transition.
>
> <snip>
----------------------

> These are some points for consideration I have in mind:
>
> * The task-* packages should be reconsidered. At first hand I'm thinking
> of all the non-latin task-* packages which recommend a particular font.
> Let's take task-hindi-desktop as an example, which currently recommends
> fonts-lohit-deva. I think it would be consistent to change that to:
>
> Recommends: fonts-noto-core | fonts-lohit-deva
>
> fonts-noto-core covers "all" scripts, so with that package installed
> there shouldn't be a need to install fonts-lohit-deva. (And for many
> non-latin scripts Noto offers better quality than the other non-latin
> font packages in the archive.)
>
>
While above should be fine technically for Hindi desktop to be viewable,
but as a user I would expect additional fonts that are available get
installed too, fonts-lohit-deva , fonts-deva etc.
Even though these extra fonts would not be used for desktop itself, and
only in say LibreOffice.

Karunakar