Hi, after asking around IRC and doing a few experiments, I'd like to discuss about fonts for the g-i. As described in [1], we mainly need to * fix some issues (i.e #341229 for Arabic) * do the best selection for every language * reduce the size of fonts I did some experiments with Arabic fonts after we discussed [2]: I used fontforge ([3]) to remove "by hand" arabic glyps from FreeSerif.ttf, and tried the mini.iso: the installer picked some better fonts for Arabic text (and size was about 20kb smaller) So my idea was to use the scripting language of fontforge to strip the unneeded glyphs from fonts files at build time; something like mklibs (mkfonts?) My rough idea was , for each language, to have an entry containing something like: language:font_file:unicode_ranges i.e: ar:ae_Tholoth.ttf:range While reporting this on debian-boot, Kenshi Muto told me about a tool [4] he's developing along with Hideaki Iwai which goal is the same; I took a look and apparently granularity is even more accurate: it selects the needed chars by exploring po files. I discussed about all of this both on #arabeyes and on #latex (which is apparently the land of fonts gurus) and I got some unicode ranges and preferred fonts: Arabic could eventually use alMohanad.ttf whose ranges would be: 0621 -> 0652 <=> 1569 -> 1618 fd3e -> fd3f <=> 64830 -> 64831 fdf2 <=> 65010 fe80 -> fefc <=> 65152 -> 65276 Persian language should use Nazli fonts which are already packaged in ttf-farsiweb I'd like to know if collecting font names / unicode ranges does make sense; if it does please let us know your favourites. regards Davide [1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstallerGUIToDo [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2005/11/msg01361.html [3] http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/ [4] http://kmuto.jp/tmp/codes.tar.gz
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