Quoting Bobby de Vos (2023-09-13 18:47:22)
> On 2023-09-12 03:09, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> > Quoting Gioele Barabucci (2023-09-12 09:19:26)
> >> On 12/09/23 08:24, Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> >>> Instead, even
> >>> the fonts-noto-core package installs a full pack of 268 (!) font files.
> >>> This is discussed in detail in #983291 [1].
> >>
> >> The issues is not that there are too many files, but that these files
> >> become extra entries in font pickers (1 entry for every ~3 files).
> >>
> >> Why not collapse all these font files into a few new font files using
> >> fontforge or a variant of nototools's merge_fonts.py?
> >>
> >> For example Noto Serif {Ahom, Bengali, Devanagari, Malayalam, Tamil,
> >> Thai, …} could be merged into "Noto Serif Asia". Then, Noto * {Africa,
> >> America, Asia, Europe, Oceania, Symbols} could be shipped in the
> >> fonts-noto-aggregated package and their entries added to Debian's
> >> fontconfig as default fallbacks. This would greatly alleviate the
> >> problem of having too many entries in the font pickers, yet provide the
> >> same coverage of fonts-noto-core.
> >
> > Please discuss that proposal with the Noto project upstream, not here.
> >
> > My understanding (and I believe documented somewhere too, e.g. in the
> > Noto CJK subproject which is the most extreme in amount of glyphs) is
> > that it is technically impossible to join all glyphs due to limitations
> > of the font formats.
>
> Indeed, font have a 64K limit on the number of glyphs. There is a
> proposal[1] to increase this limit, and it is being discussed [2].
>
> Merging some (so not all, so the 64K limit is not reached) of the Noto
> fonts together might work. In addition to merging the sets of glyphs,
> you would also need to merge the OpenType layout data in the GSUB and
> GPOS tables.
>
> And the tool[3] from Google looks like it might handle the GSUB/GPOS
> merging.
>
> Different fonts (say for Devanagari and Arabic) might have different
> line spacing, a merged font would have to choose which line spacing to
> use. As a result, the line spacing in the font might be too loose, or it
> might be too tight, resulting in clipping and/or inter-line clashes
> depending on which script was being displayed. The source for the tool
> mentions this line spacing issue.
>
> And yes, Noto provides separate fonts for (in this example) Arabic and
> Devanaragi) even though the top of the Noto website[4] says "Noto: A
> typeface for the world" (sort of implying one font) but further down the
> page it says "Noto is a collection of high-quality fonts" (plural)
>
> I am curious about the comment above "1 entry for every ~3 files" In
> LibreOffice Writer (7.5.6) on my Ubuntu (22.04) system at least,
> installing a variable font results in fewer lines in a font picker that
> installing a bunch of static fonts.
Thanks for those details, Bobby.
Let me however reiterate my main point of previous post, which still
stands:
Please discuss that proposal with the Noto project upstream, not here.
Kind regards,
- Jonas
--
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
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