Default Japanese Hiragana and Katakana fonts look ugly

[Jun Kobayashi]

This is because FreeSerif and FreeSans include poor
Hiragana and Katakana glyphs, FreeSerif has higher
priority than KochiMincho, and FreeSans has higher
priority than KochiGothic on /etc/fonts/fonts.conf.

It seems that this order set to fix Malone #21332
"Awful greek gnome fonts" - https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/21332

[Jun Kobayashi (jkbys)]

with default /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

[Jun Kobayashi (jkbys)]

Putting back /etc/fonts/fonts.conf similer to included in version 2.3.2-1ubuntu3 - drop FreeSans, FreeSerif and FreeMono priority.
This is good for Japanese Hiragana and Katakana glyphs, but may be bad for Greek glyphs.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Subscribing the Ubuntu Greek Translators; perhaps they can confirm or deny whether this reintroduces the problem with Greek fonts

[Giorgos Logiotatidis (seadog)]

hi, no problem with greek fonts. everythings looks ok except the monospace fonts which were broken either way.

[Jiahua Huang (huangjiahua)]

the same problem as the display of chinese font's .
Using defalut fontconfig's configure , display of chinese font's is too ugly.

It seems the CJK fonts haven't been configured suitablly.
Should we take out the CJK configuring in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf ,
and use the language-pack ( such as language-pack-zh ) to
configure the CJK fonts .
If we have changes they, the CJK fonts will be configured suitablly,
the defalut display of CJK font's will be perfect,
and it will not affect other language users.

[Simos Xenitellis  (simosx)]

The reason why FreeSans (et al) have been moved over the CJK fonts is because the CJK fonts contain Greek glyphs. Therefore, Greek appear very badly if for some reason the CJK fonts are used to display them. The Greek glyphs in the CJK fonts do not follow modern Greek typography standards and display really bad.

However, in Dapper there is the addition of Dejavu and when Giorgos Logiotatidis mentions that it is ok for Greek, this is because Dejavu Mono provides glyphs for Greek. However, this works only in Ubuntu Dapper.

I am a bit sceptical about Dejavu as it can crash applications (see
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/fontconfig/+bug/31910).

Is there a way to specify in fonts.conf to ignore specific fonts when there is a need to display glyphs from a specific Unicode range?
This would be the best solution, as this type of problem will come up quite often in new languages.

[Simos Xenitellis  (simosx)]

This is a request for an enhacement as a result of a discussion on issues with
fontconfig where the wrong font was selected for some bad glyphs in fonts.
In general it is difficult to request a font designer to remove certain glyphs
from the font. If the font is listed higher in the preference list in
fonts.conf, it will mask any quality glyphs in other fonts.

This problem arises often with "universal" unicode fonts that provide
unoptimised glyphs.

Therefore, we are looking into a functionality that can be configured from
fonts.conf and would allow to hide/disable certain glyphs or range of glyphs for
specific fonts.

[Simos Xenitellis  (simosx)]

DejaVu 2.3 has been added to Ubuntu Dapper Flight 5, which has good support for Central European/Cyrillic/Greek.

The need for FreeFont over Kochi and other Asian fonts is diminised.

In addition, there is a drive to get Ubuntu work well for CJK.

Therefore, you may pursue to have FreeFonts (FreeSans, FreeSerif, FreeMono) be placed lower (at the bottom?) of the preference list in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf.

[Abel Cheung (abelcheung)]

In general, there is no future if each language is fighting for priority of its own font inside fonts.conf. Matt and Michael has been discussing about the possibility of deciding font order in a per-locale basis, adding this support inside each language pack. This might work well for most users.

[Simos Xenitellis  (simosx)]

Abel, that would be useful as well (lang pack-specific fonts.conf).

I linked this bug report with a FreeDesktop bug about adding support in fontconfig to do this dirty job. It feels feasible as fontconfig has to sort out font coverage only once.

I believe for this version of Ubuntu, a good workaround could be to simply drop FreeFonts at the bottom of the preference list, as DejaVu provides good coverage for Western languages (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek).

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

With the new language-selector and the fontconfig-voodoo commands a better japanese fontconfig environment should be available. If you use language-selector to switch to japanese it should do the required work. Could you please let me know if it works for you and improves the font quality?

The current fontconfig snippet for ja_JP is available here:
http://people.ubuntu.com/~mvo/bzr/language-selector/language-selector--mvo/fontconfig/ja_JP

Thanks,
 Michael

[Jun Kobayashi (jkbys)]

I confirmed that the new packages improves the Japanese font quality.
Thank you.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks a lot for testing the latest change. I mark this bug as fixed for now. I will be happy to add any further improviments to the ja_JP fontconfig file (if there are any).

Thanks,
 michael

[Freedesktop (freedesktop)]

Fontconfig already has the notion of languages and that already allows for
fine-grained per-language configuration. Follow this thread for examples of how
to do that:

  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-i18n-list/2006-March/msg00037.html

This is a WONTFIX IMHO.

[Plam (plam)]

Marking WONTFIX.

[Simos Xenitellis  (simosx)]

I would strongly suggest to submit a bug report (+patch) to the fontconfig project that places "FreeFont" at the bottom of the preference list.

FreeFont is a sort of "universal" font, however the quality of the glyphs is not uniform. Unless it is at the bottom of the fonts.conf preference list, it masks any other fonts that lay beneath.

The bug report that introduced FreeFont in the middle of the preference list is
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4639

I did not know at the time that it would cause such issues. Discussions at the fontconfig mailing list did not bring up these issues.

Therefore, make a bug report similar to
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4639
that takes FreeSans/FreeSerif/FreeMonoSans and puts them back to the bottom of the preference list.

This way, any other distributions will benefit from this change.