Excessive number of disparate fonts bundled together

[Dan Dascalescu]

The package `fonts-noto-core` contains 150+ highly exotic fonts, including cuneiform and hieroglyphics. These are high-quality but for all practical intents and purposes, never needed all at once, not even by a PhD in linguistics. 99%+ of the users will need only one language out of those.

This sheer number of fonts clutters font selectors in applications, causing some to freeze[1], and the users to waste time hunting for the fonts they actually care about.

Removing these fonts is an option, but it unnecessarily wastes the time of most users[2] (who use English[3]), is in some cases impossible[4], and far from simple. The question of how to remove unwanted fonts in Ubuntu has come again and again:

* https://superuser.com/questions/248844/how-do-you-remove-fonts-from-ubuntu
* https://askubuntu.com/questions/820746/remove-unused-fonts
* https://askubuntu.com/questions/371213/how-to-delete-fonts-in-ubuntu
* https://askubuntu.com/questions/1239037/removing-all-unnecessary-fonts-from-system
* https://askubuntu.com/questions/978995/is-there-a-simple-way-for-uninstalling-fonts
* https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=259109
* https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=297573
* https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=279672
* https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=339442
* https://askubuntu.com/questions/214950/how-can-i-remove-fonts-that-i-never-use-from-libreoffice-and-linux-in-general

Removing some font packages solves part of the problem, but since `fonts-noto-core` bundles so many fonts together, users have no way of removing unwanted fonts from it.

Can this package be broken up? An easy option, which I believe would cover 80% of the cases with far less than 20% of the effort, would be Latin vs. non-Latin.

[1]: https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php/77868-How-can-we-reduce-the-crapton-of-fonts-installed-by-default
[2]: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/excessive-fonts-installed-by-default/20924/5?u=dandv
[3]: https://ubuntu.com/desktop/statistics
[4]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433215

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Thanks for your report. It seems to be an offshoot from <https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/20924>.

Please note that the fonts-noto packaging happens at Debian, so Debian is a more proper place to bring up this discussion.

I see the old bug <https://bugs.debian.org/756456>. Actually, the fonts-noto package is a meta package which pulls a bunch of binaries:

$ apt depends fonts-noto
fonts-noto
  Depends: fonts-noto-core
  Recommends: fonts-noto-cjk
  Recommends: fonts-noto-cjk-extra
  Recommends: fonts-noto-color-emoji
  Recommends: fonts-noto-extra
  Recommends: fonts-noto-mono
  Recommends: fonts-noto-ui-core
  Recommends: fonts-noto-ui-extra
  Recommends: fonts-noto-unhinted

But since your request is about splitting fonts-noto-core further, I don't think the old Debian bug applies, so you'd better submit a new one.

[Dan Dascalescu (ddascalescu+launchpad)]

Oy. Debian's ticketing system is the most archaic and arcane I've seen in the past 20 years. But after jumping through the hoops several times, here it is, (along with my email in clear for all to spam) -

https://bugs.debian.org/983291

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.