Hi,
I spent some time trying to elaborate a clean way to fix the problems
with Arabic/Persian fonts described in [1] ("Arabic script" section);
my goal is to come up with a decent proposal for handling such situations
where, at least IMO, is too early to poke maintainers asking to include
dependencies on fontforge and scripts which clear unwanted glyphs.
The idea is to make good use of the font tarballs on Alioth which makes
it a semi-official way of doin' things but still well reproducible.
In this case, to fix things, we need to delete Arabic fonts from
FreeSerif.ttf and FreeSansBold.ttf so that the right glyphs are taken
from the fonts contained in ttf-arabeys-udeb
I wrote a fontforge script which accepts as argument both single glyphs and ranges
(i.e "strip_glyps.pe FreeSerif.ttf FreeSerif_strip.ttf 30 40 1536:1919 64336:65278")
and removes the specified glyphs (Kenshi and Hidetaka script expects
as argument the _wanted_ glyphs and caused fontforge to segfault
when called with a few thousand glyphs as argument)
The idea is the following:
* Use the above script (which could be archived somewhere) to strip
FreeSerif.ttf and FreeSansBold.ttf and create ttf-freefont_0.1.tgz
(which has to be uploaded on Alioth and used in place of the udeb)
* use ttf-arabeyes-udeb (which contains "ae_AlMohanad.ttf") in place of ttf-arabeyes.tgz
(which should be deleted from Alioth)
Here's the needed patch (already tested on my machine):
--- pkg-lists/gtk-miniiso/common (revision 32944)
+++ pkg-lists/gtk-miniiso/common (working copy)
@@ -30,5 +30,9 @@
libpango1.0-udeb
libatk1.0-udeb
fontconfig-udeb
-ttf-freefont-udeb
+# For the moment we use a stripped version on Alioth
+# udeb will have to be stripped accordingly
+#ttf-freefont-udeb
+ttf-arabeyes-udeb
+
This way we would get Arabic and Persian fixed and we could move
on with CJK which are being worked on already; I personally would not fix
CJK at the same time, since we could play with stripping also CJK glyphs
out of Freefonts
Let me know what you think
regards,
Davide
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstallerGUIFonts
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