Uyghur don't display correctly

[Gheyret T.Kenji]

Hi Developer,

Now I am testning Ubuntu 12.04 (Daily Build) .
I am mainly testing Uyghur Language support.
Today I installing ubuntu, in the installer I selected Uyghur for Installer langguage. The font for displaying Uyghur in Installer is very bad shape and Uyghur character did not join correctly.

Is it possible to use diffent font for Uyghur when installing?

(This Bug exists in Ubuntu Oneiric too).

I will upload my screenshot tonight.

Gheyret Kenji
2012/03/01

[Burkut (burkut)]

Dear font developers,

Could you please add the following codepoints and glyphs to your DejaVu fonts for supporting Uighur language?

U+06C7 ARABIC LETTER U (U+FBD7 U+FBD8)
U+06C8 ARABIC LETTER YU (U+FBDB U+FBDC)
U+06CB ARABIC LETTER VE (U+FBDE U+FBDF)
U+06D0 ARABIC LETTER E (U+FBE4 U+FBE5 U+FBE6 U+FBE7)

Thank you.

[Gheyret T.Kenji (gheyretkenji)]

This bug also exists in Oneiric.

[Burkut (burkut)]

Hello there, is there anybody to respond to this bug?

[Ben Laenen (benlaenen)]

Well, I made the Arabic in DejaVu, but over time I wasn't really too happy with the glyphs, so I stopped work on it, and had the plan to redo them one day. But a busy life postpones these plans again and again, so that's why these glyphs aren't made yet.

[Burkut (burkut)]

Hello, Ben,

Thanks for your reply. DejaVu Sans is the default GUI font on Ubuntu in Uyghur language, we were able to complete more than 95% translation string into Uyghur. (That is more than 200,000 sentences!) We really hoped to use Ubuntu in our language, unfortunately, the GUI font's lack of support Uyghur language gives us a problem and challenge.

Last year, one DejaVu font developer, MichaelJP, added the above 4 glyphs and their presentation forms to the font. Unfortunately, it seems that he can not commit it. I still have the copy and diff file.

If you do not have enough time to develop any glyphs, can you just simply add the already made glypths to the font and commit it? We really hope to solve this problem before Ubuntu 12.04 is released next month.

Thank you again.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

The installer does not do any font selection that I'm aware of. This is normally the responsibility of fontconfig, although of course it also relies on having the correct fonts available on the live session.

I suspect that the correct font package is fonts-ukij-uyghur, but unfortunately that's far too big for us to be able to fit it on the live CD. Do you have any other specific recommendations for what font should be used here, preferably one that's already on the live CD?

[Burkut (burkut)]

The DejaVu Sans font (ver: 2.33) is faulty and it's not been updated since February, 2011. Since then, we have contacted the font team and have it fixed to support Uyghur properly. Unfortunately, there is no updated release (ver: 2.34?) yet, and it is still in the git repository. If Ubuntu pick up the updated DejaVu Sans from the git and build a newer DejaVu fonts package for the live CD, that would be perfect.

Another possibility is the KacstOne font. It supports Uyghur perfectly. We are puzzled why the installer or fontconfig picked up faulty DejaVu Sans instead of KacstOne when selecting Uyghur as the Installation language.

The original Debian installer uses Nazli font for Arabic, Persian. It was faulty to support Uyghur. Recently our team, Ubuntu Uyghur Translation Team, fixed and updated the font to support Uyghur properly. It is just less than 100 KB in size, with the regular and bold style.

As the FontConfig selects DejaVu for Uyghur, the currently available best approach could be making a newer version of DejaVu font package in Ubuntu, getting it from the git repository, not from the year old version 2.33. Because, even if we find a better font with small size, there might be a problem with fontconfig to pick up the right font, thus, making our effort useless.

As we are running out of time for the 12.04 release, we are very anxious to try any available way to solve this problem to have a better Ubuntu experience in Uyghur language.

[Burkut (burkut)]

I run a Precise LiveCD in Uyghur language on VirtualBox and used FontConfig commands on Terminal. Attached is the actual screen shot result. The FontConfig commands here selected the correct fonts (KacstOne) for Uyghur.

I think this proves the FontConfig is working perfectly here. The problem is still with Ubuntu's GUI, the GUI is not using the correct font which FontConfig selected perfectly. Everything on Ubuntu screen is using the faulty DejaVu font instead of KacstOne font.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

If updating the Dejavu font is sufficient, then this seems to be the best approach to me for 12.04. Reassigning.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Eagle, are you sure that this is fixed upstream already? I saw your mail exchange with MihailJP and the patch attachment in that mail, but it seems this patch hasn't made it upstream yet:

http://dejavu.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/dejavu/trunk/dejavu-fonts/src/DejaVuSans.sfd?view=log

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

This is the patch that got mailed around. Eagle, you said that this was tested and confirmed to work?

[Burkut (burkut)]

Martin, That is the patch with perfecr Uyghur support. (We tested the patch thoroughly about a year ago and everything worked perfectly to support Uyghur language.) If it is applied to current DejaVu Sans and from this a new DejaVu Sans font package is made and used in Ubuntu, All the above problems would be solved.

Let me make it clear. In order to fix the problem, we need to:
(1) Apply this patch to the current DejaVu Sans font.
(2) From the newly patched font, make a new DejaVu font package in Ubuntu.
(3) Use this new font and package in Ubuntu 12.04.

Eagle Burkut
Ubuntu Uyghur Translation Group

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Eagle, but indeed this is not upstream yet, right? Can you please contact the upstream developers again to get this committed there, too? Thanks!

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Uploaded to unapproved.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ttf-dejavu - 2.33-2ubuntu1

---------------
ttf-dejavu (2.33-2ubuntu1) precise; urgency=low

  * Add 01_missing_uighur.patch: Add missing glyphs for Uighur language.
    Thanks MihailJP for the patch. (LP: #943830)
  * debian/rules: Disable simple-patchsys.mk, it conflicts with the 3.0
    (quilt) format.
 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Tue, 10 Apr 2012 07:58:03 +0200

[Burkut (burkut)]

Martin,

You are right; this patch is not in upstream yet. We tried to contact the DejaVu project admins to have this patch applied and added to the upstream, unfortunately, there is no response from them yet. If you have any other better ways to do this, please help us to do so.

And I downloaded the new DejaVu font deb package (2.33-2ubuntu1) and installed it on my current Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneric), it worked perfectly. (I am downloading the 12.04 daily CD image to test the installation and other GUIs. I will report the result in shortly.)

Thank you all, Canonical and Ubuntu Developers, Maintainers...

Eagle Burkut
Ubuntu Uyghur Translation Group

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Created attachment 79617
missing-uighur-glyphs.patch

Here's the patch Ubuntu has been using for a year and a half.

[Nocturnaldreamer (nocturnaldreamer)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Created attachment 79617 [details] [review]
> missing-uighur-glyphs.patch
>
> Here's the patch Ubuntu has been using for a year and a half.

Thanks for pointing this out, indeed the patch has been sent to the mailing list a while back, but seems to have been overlooked and forgotten.

Since it has been extensively tested and used downstream, I've gone ahead and committed it.

Sorry for the long delay!