Mişu Moldovan wrote:
> > What about a realy special font that contains _only_ the glyphs > > necessary to display all the countries' names? > > > > Then load the font, when necessary into the RAM, from the CD? > > > > This way we'll need to include only that font package udeb in the > initrd, since other fonts will be retrived later from cdrom, right? Exactly :)This surely sounds like an ugly hack. Taking into consideration the time and effort it takes to make a nice font, who will waste their artistic energy for something like this?
i agree: this is why i was asking if bterm fonts can be converted to be used by pango.
ok, but we still need someone that can tell us what exactly what fonts are to be included to balance languages covering and space contraints.> This could be a good idea: is this possible to do? and WHO is going > to do it? I have a link, and if he is not able to do it, he might point us to someone who can.However, in this thread someone mentioned the solution in which the app is intelligently enough to search for the missing glyphs from the main font in other available fonts. This is feasible, but the results may well be quite ugly.The nice solution would be if somehow you'll be able to provide the right font for every locale. Then carefully choose a small set of fonts with good coverage of the Unicode range (complementary coverage if possible, for the sake of optimization). And please don't choose ugly fonts that have good coverage. Look for the nice fonts (even with limited coverage) with beautifully crafted glyphs for the languages of most users (English, Spanish, Chinese, French, Arabic, Russian, German, Japanese, Korean etc.) I highly recommend the DejaVu fonts for latin european languages (they are derived from the Bitstream Vera family). There should be some free and nice looking Arabic, CJK and Slavic fonts in Debian too, and with these set of fonts you will be covering more then 98% of the users.
Anyway i think we should first start building iso images including the gtk frontend, all the needed libraries and the fonts we already have (ttf-freefont-udeb ) and maybe those that can be packed in a reasonable amount of time at no-effort. After a graphical installer cdrom is ready we'll be able to tell more precisely what we exactly need and while preparing the cdrom maybe some good ideas will come up to our minds.
As i said before libgtk+2.0-directfb0-udeb is no longer available for i386: Alastair, since you're the package mantainer is it possible to create a i386 udeb? if you provide that we should (theorically) be able to build cdroms.
I'm no cd building expert: is there any volunteer to try building the cd?Some times ago Eugeniy did a great experimental work building an X based graphical netinst cd. If no one volunteers i'll try to do that next week, but i'm not sure i'm really able..
ciao attilio