Comment 5 for bug 217107

Jan Niklas Hasse wrote on 2008-08-25:
>> Mantas Kriaučiūnas wrote on 2008-08-25: (permalink)
>> Does ttf-liberation fonts contains characters for non-ascii characters, like current ubuntu defaults fonts - ttf-dejavu?
> Yes, of course. They are even better hinted:
> http://watteimdocht.de/jan-nik/liberation/ (see the greek letters in the gedit screenshots)

That screenshot isn't an evidence because of 2 reasons:

1. All gnome and majority of other modern X applications uses fonconfig library and this library automatically replaces missing characters from other fonts - for example you can see Russian and other letters when choose any font if there are at least one similar font with Russian letters (for example DejaVu) in your system. You can test if by simply pasting text bellow (with Russian and few Lithuanian letter) and choose any font (eg. Courier 10 Pitch doesn't contain Russian and Lithuanian letters) in gedit or OpenOffice:
„Я иду домои а вы - нет Ąžuolėlį šienąvę“

2. Existence of Greek letters isn't enough for default font. DejaVu fonts contains thousands of letters for majority of European and Asian countries, more about coverage of various characters in DejaVu fonts you can read at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts and http://dejavu.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/dejavu/tags/version_2_26/dejavu-fonts/langcover.txt

So, I still think, that Liberation fonts doesn't contain characters for popular languages, and, because of this, aren't suitable as default Ubuntu fonts. For example /etc/defoma/hints/ttf-liberation.hints file from ttf-liberation package has specifies, that Liberation fonts covers only ISO8859-1 Charset :(
You can compare with the file from ttf-dejavu-core package (/etc/defoma/hints/ttf-dejavu-core.hints ) - as you see DejaVu fonts covers several ISO8859-X Charsets and most importantly - Unicode Charset ISO10646-1

If you have real evidence, that Liberation fonts contains at least major European and Asian Languages like Polish, Greek, Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Byelorussian, Czech, etc. and covers big part of Unicode Charset ISO10646-1 then please write an URL to the public source of such information (like this file http://dejavu.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/dejavu/tags/version_2_26/dejavu-fonts/langcover.txt in DejaVu fonts case) and report a bug against ttf-liberation package to include missing charsets in ttf-liberation.hints file.