Comment 11 for bug 659280

>Those applications using English text are displayed uglier owing to their original
> appearance of English letter character from the adopted chinese font.
>
> You may put those chinese fonts with confortable appearance of English letter
> character into superior order to rule out those ugly ones, if you dislike them.

This is an unacceptable resolution, because people may change their preferred English fonts to any fonts other than Dejavu or Bitstream Vera, you cannot force them to use a Chinese font which cannot provide best experience.

Fontconfig has the concept of priority, it is designed to make everything *just work* - When there isn't a character in the fonts of higher priority, applications should go and look at other fonts of lower priority.

I've read on the forum post you've shown. At least for now, 69-language-selector-zh-*.conf shouldn't be removed because nobody stands out to propose a better solution which does not produce regressions.

> It still can not solve the square character problems in chinese when one applys other
> application even though xpdf-chinese-* could solve the square character problems in
> chinese PDF files.

I guess the "Other application" in your words are most likely to say evince, okular, nautilus preview, etc. But please be aware, they all use poppler library, and they all use poppler-data for CJK typefaces. We should consider poppler-data is buggy, so the issue should be fixed ultimately within poppler*. xpdf sets us an example that everything is possible to be OK if we do not break user experience.

You might be aware, that Ubuntu's default font settings are accepted by most users and considered as the best defaults. If we do remove 69-language-selector-zh-*.conf, Chinese font appearance will most likely have minor differences to Debian, which does not has any tweak for Chinese.

> However it should be better to wipe out those fonts without chinese chacters from the
> file /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-zh-*.conf so that the annoying square
> character problems in chinese OS never appear forever.

No, at least not now. The buggy thing is poppler-data, which does not have correct maps like xpdf-chinese-* (and dependencies) do. Because poppler is widely used, it generates an impression that "other applications" are affected, but only xpdf survived because it is a special case.