Re: gtk, fonts, locales
On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 07:42:48PM -0400, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> For starts, I'm working on trying to fix the Ugly Font Syndrome that
> people complain about in Debian. I recently got bit by this problem
> after a dist-upgrade on Sid.
You probably have some old X component lying around. Either an old X
server, or an old X font server. New versions have a work-around for
this bug (see below).
> First, the locale for users doesn't seem to be set properly. THe locale
> was C, even though it should have been en_US (iso8859-1). I found a
Well, C is presumably the default.
> Finally, there is a bug in gtkhtml and it's default font selection.
> Even with my locale set, it defaults to the iso10646 fontset. This is a
> known bug in gtkhtml, and not necessary debian's responsibility to fix.
> However, I am curious as to why I have an iso10646 fontset. It
> definitely isn't a fontset I want, and don't use. Why is it installed?
It should be a fontset you want. And you should use it. Unless you
would rather not see the names of your email correspondents correctly
rendered, or people's names on webpages, or occasional snippets of
foreign languages. It's the way forward.
However, old applications expecting 8-bit encodings will break when
they're unexpectedly given a 16-bit encoding. For this reason, the X
server and the X font server have been hacked to return iso8859 before
iso10646 when no font-set is requested specifically.
> Should there perhaps be a different set of X font package for the
> differnt locales (or at least geographic/cultural/linguistic regions) ?
> I know that could get big, but I'm guessing thee is a big waste in disk
> and download space for these? Or is the memory usage not that high for
> each locale?
There are different sets.
But iso10646 is something we should all be using.
As to the font size problem: perhaps you have the 100dpi fonts
installed and you'd prefer the 75dpi fonts? They're "bigger".
Jules
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