Re: Euro symbol and XFree
Hi,
At Sun, 21 Oct 2001 19:27:28 -0500,
Branden Robinson wrote:
> The current font encodings in xfonts-base aren't about equality, they're
> about backward-compatibility (and keeping the size of the package
> reasonable).
>
> Historically, the X Consortium -> the Open Group -> the XFree86 Project
> only made ISO-8859-1-encoded fonts available.
>
> It was the work of Markus Kuhn for XFree86 that greatly increased the
> repertoire of represented character sets in the fonts shipped by
> XFree86.
>
> As you can see from reading the Debian X FAQ, because of the historical
> availablity of BDF/PCF fonts with the X Window System itself only in
> ISO-8859-1, many toolkits and applications request these fonts with
> wildcards in the charset and encoding fields and expect to get
> ISO-8859-1 back. This is a poor assumption to make but that doesn't
> change the fact that a lot of people have made it.
>
> When code has been committed to XFree86 to permit on-the-fly font
> recoding, the ISO-8859-1 fonts will come out of xfonts-base, leaving
> only ISO-10646-1 for Western character sets.
>
> The -transcoded packages aren't about putting users of non-Latin-1
> languages into a ghetto. If that were the case I wouldn't ship various
> JIS and GB fonts in xfonts-base (remember the days of "xfntbig" and
> "xfntcjk"?), and I certainly wouldn't ship the huge ISO-10646-1 fonts.
>
> I know it's popular, especially among some of the French Debian
> developers, to paint me as a monolingual racist[1] and/or a nationalist,
> but that simply isn't the case, as any review of the XFree86 package
> changelog will reveal. I just think it's rude, as does XFree86, to yank
> the rugs out from under the users of all these applications which were
> written with lazy and poor assumptions about the availabity of character
> sets on the system. If people have a problem with ISO-8859-1-centrism,
> I suggest they take it up with the people who made those assumptions,
> not XFree86, not my packages, and not me.
It is strange that French people blame you as monolingual racist
because French people also use ISO-8859-1.
Anyway, I don't insist that xfonts-base should not include so many
ISO-8859-1 fonts. I just insisted xfonts-base should add one font
from each encoding, besides its current contents. I think this is
a good compromise between people who need Latin-9 fonts and people
who need other fonts under the situation that xfonts-base should not
be too big.
The only way to solve "I need plenty of Latin-9 fonts but I don't
want to install other fonts" problem is to supply separate packages
for all encodings (xfonts-iso8859-1, xfonts-iso-8859-2, xfonts-koi8-r,
xfonts-jisx0208, ...) but I think this idea is stupid.
It is true that I think the current situation of XFree86 and so on
is ISO-8859-1-centrism. However, I am not radical enough to intent
to change this situation by remove many ISO-8859-1 fonts from
xfonts-base package and make ISO-8859-1 people less happy than now,
though I feel attraction from the idea. However, I insist that we
should not try to enlarge this centrism by including all Latin-9
(ISO-8859-15) fonts in xfonts-base. Thus, I am against Marco's
idea.
On the other hand, we should try to erase this centrism by milder
way, by, for example, recommending internationalized applications
than non-internationalized ones in Debian Alternative System, and
Priority: fields, compiling packages so that they can handle
multibyte/combining/right-to-left languages, helping upstream
developers to support multibyte/combining/right-to-left languages,
treat minor-language-speakers faster in NM process (note that minor
language here means minority in Debian Developers), and so on.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
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