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Re: Completely switch graphical installer to fonts-noto?



Hi,

Holger Wansing <hwansing@mailbox.org> (2020-03-27):
> Jonas Smedegaard <jonas@jones.dk> wrote:
> > Since the very purpose of fonts-noto is large coverage and usage in
> > embedded devices (e.g. stripping kerning values), I suspect that it
> > may be beneficial to use also for other locales.
> > 
> > Please do tell if there is interest in that, and how I can help
> > there.
> 
> I'm unsure, if switching completely to Google fonts (fonts-noto is a
> Google project, right?) is what we want, thinking about monopolism...

Right now, I have no strong opinion on this particular topic.

> However, I did some tests, and I managed to get a netboot-gtk mini.iso image
> built with only this font packages:
> 	fonts-android-udeb (apparently needed for CJK languages)
> 	fonts-noto-unhinted-udeb
> 
> For my eyes, the result is: all languages are rendered, no TOFU signs
> like the ones we had in the past, when fonts where missing.  The fonts
> are looking different than before, but not bad IMO (speaking for
> English and my mother tongue German, I would say: it's 100% readable.)
> We would need to validate the quality for all languages (with the help
> of translators/users (preferably) or with screenshots old <-> new).
> But apart from that, at the first look it seems not that bad!
> 
> I have uploaded the resulting mini.iso (and the corresponding
> gtk-common file from ..debian-installer/build/pkg-lists/) to GoFile,
> try it at
> https://gofile.io/?c=l59HTp
> 
> 
> Note:
> With the current setup, this leads to an image growth of 10MB (when I
> compare the builds here on my laptop: 75MB for an original built
> netboot-gtk image as it is now configured in GIT, and 85MB for an
> image with only the two udebs mentioned above).
> I assume this could be reduced, if unneeded fonts are skipped from the
> used udeb though. Maybe we could even reduce the image size compared
> to the original size, because of less overlapping glyphs (need to be
> checked !).
> 
> So, what's the opinion of the team: is there any interest to move to
> fonts-noto?

Besides the first topic you mentioned, and the idea of putting all our
eggs in the same basket (possibly meaning less maintenance for us,
and/or maybe more pressure on the maintainers of a newly-critical
component), the big question is what users will think of the changes.

I suppose the best way to approach this would be to ask e.g. translators
for each language to compare the rendering before/after, and have them
tell us what they think (maybe by setting up a poll). I suspect this
might be a rather time consuming task…


Cheers,
-- 
Cyril Brulebois (kibi@debian.org)            <https://debamax.com/>
D-I release manager -- Release team member -- Freelance Consultant

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