Make font preferences for Arabic locale agnostic

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Currently — if fonts-noto-core and fonts-noto-ui-core are installed — fontconfig picks Noto Sans Arabic UI as the default sans-serif font for Arabic, but only under an Arabic locale. The latter is to avoid a change of the default sans-serif font (from DejaVu to Noto) for most other languages only by installing fonts-noto-core.

But with fontconfig 2.14.1-3ubuntu1 the prerequisites have changed. Noto is now preferred over DejaVu by default as soon as fonts-noto-core is present, irrespective of Ubuntu's custom file for Arabic.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2023-January/042449.html

So we can and should drop the requirement to run under an Arabic locale to have fontconfig pick the desired Noto fonts for Arabic.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

This requires some investigation on how things actually work. One thing to look at is how the default font in the Firefox snap is determined.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package language-selector - 0.222

---------------
language-selector (0.222) mantic; urgency=medium

  * data/pkg_depends:
    - Always pull hunspell and myspell dicts
  * Switch to Noto as default font
    - Add 56-language-selector-prefer.conf
    - Drop 56-language-selector-ar.conf (no longer needed)
    - Simplify list of fonts pulled by check-language-support
    - Install extra fontconfig file for the snaps
    - This is a step to achieve the goal in
      https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/36923
    - Fixes LP: #1866038 and LP: #2009303

 -- Gunnar Hjalmarsson <email address hidden> Wed, 19 Jul 2023 19:35:48 +0200