Lots of seemingly redudant fonts

[Tuomas Salo]

The font selection list shows about 84 "families", most of which seem to be
local versions of the same few fonts. For example, there are 38 fonts whose name
starts with "ae_" that all look like Bitstream Vera Serif/Sans, Roman/Bold.
(BTW, why aren't the normal versions named "Regular" but "Roman"?). In fact,
there seem to be even more fonts that look like them.

The large number of similar-looking fonts makes it ridiculously hard to really
choose a font.

How to reproduce:
1. Open gnome-font-properties
2. Choose eg. "Application font"
3. A very long font list appears

[Wouter (woutervanwijk-netscape)]

I can confirm this. There are way to many fonts (and dubplicates) in the
font-selection-boxes for me. I use the dutch local.

[Dennis Kaarsemaker (dennis)]

*** Bug 25490 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Phil Bull (philbull)]

vfs-ls fonts:/// lists 166 available fonts. I use maybe 6 of them; finding an
appropriate font takes ages if you don't know the name.

Maybe the way fonts are handled should be changed? I.e, have <10 favourite/most
frequently used fonts, then provide some way of accessing a wider selection.
AFAIK this would be a GTK change.

In the mean time, I'd settle for installing far fewer by default. 30 is pushing
it, really.

[Frank Niedermann (fbn)]

I can confirm this bug. On a brand new Feisty installation there are a lot of (similar?) ae_... fonts

[Chris Beaven (smileychris)]

Regarding the ae_* fonts, they are part of the ttf-arabeyes package. Remove them with the following command:

sudo apt-get remove ttf-arabeyes

[Mat Tomaszewski (mat.t.)]

Not really a papercut, although it it a valid issue. We're looking at changing it for Karmic separately.

[Mat Tomaszewski (mat.t.)]

Just to explain why it's not a papercut - the issue is too complex for a trivial fix. There are some localization issues that need to be considered as well as many other criteria (font categorizations etc). Still, it is a valid bug, targeting it for Karmic.

[Ryan Prior (ryanprior)]

Confirmed, still a problem for saucy. Software like "font manager" exists in repository and allows you to fix the problem for yourself, but the out-of-the-box experience of selecting fonts is really junk.

[Ryan Prior (ryanprior)]

This should probably be part of choosing your locale (along with time zone, language, and keyboard) in ubiquity.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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