Hi!
With fontconfig 2.14, which entered testing last January, upstream
fontconfig prefers Noto over DejaVu in /etc/fonts/conf.d/60-latin.conf.
The change was not preceded by any discussion I'm aware of. It appears
to be related to this Fedora measure:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultToNotoFonts
So Debian was kind of caught off guard.
This is in line with the consistent pattern of making changes without much user consultation in that world.
Seems change relates to giving a consistent look n feel, by using the same font family across scripts.
Since its been a while since this mail , I only want to respond to specific example picked.
My personal view is that it is a change in the right direction, and I
have taken a couple of follow-up steps in Debian. There are still loose
ends and more work to be done to achieve a consistent configuration in
this respect. However, before taking further steps, I feel there is a
need to reach out to a broader audience about the change. Hence this
message. Basically I'm asking if this move towards Noto is desirable
and, if so, I plea for relevant input for the completion of the transition.
<snip>
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These are some points for consideration I have in mind:
* The task-* packages should be reconsidered. At first hand I'm thinking
of all the non-latin task-* packages which recommend a particular font.
Let's take task-hindi-desktop as an example, which currently recommends
fonts-lohit-deva. I think it would be consistent to change that to:
Recommends: fonts-noto-core | fonts-lohit-deva
fonts-noto-core covers "all" scripts, so with that package installed
there shouldn't be a need to install fonts-lohit-deva. (And for many
non-latin scripts Noto offers better quality than the other non-latin
font packages in the archive.)
While above should be fine technically for Hindi desktop to be viewable,
but as a user I would expect additional fonts that are available get installed too, fonts-lohit-deva , fonts-deva etc.
Even though these extra fonts would not be used for desktop itself, and only in say LibreOffice.
Karunakar