Comment 31 for bug 629622

Revision history for this message
Paul Sladen (sladen) wrote : Re: MIR+FFE: Inclusion of Ubuntu Font Family ~0.7 in Maverick (10.10)

We can concentrate on executing the rest of the to-do list above and ensuring that the font family .deb package is available and in the right places to be seeded into the CD images. This is virtually all tediously technical and procedural; eg. tweaking the advertised font name, version, license, display name, crossing tees and dotting eyes.

With the proviso of having got the pieces into place first, the possibility and policy decision of /whether/ to ship as the user-interface default typeface for {Ubuntu,Kubuntu,both} themes can be left until closer to the ship date. Even if an end-decision were to be to just ship on the CDs, this gets UFF out to the wider audience. I think it's been mostly resolved elsewhere that the candidate versions will ship with a minor release number (not be metrics stable); so any decision is coming down to just the user-interface choice question for the moment---I don't think we should run the risk of going with document font defaults (eg. the hinting/layout issues that need researching more for OpenOffice.org).

To allay the fears about ("only"!) having ~1,200 codepoints covered with glyphs at the moment, glyph substitution will fall back to other fonts just as it does today (in particular to Deja), so scripts not covered specifically by the Ubuntu Font Family will display much as they do already. It's perhaps easier to think of it as the Ubuntu Font Family "overriding" the $default rendering /when/ UFF has the coverage available.

Thank you to Alan, Bruno G, et al for working through and double-checking that the substitution is working as expected. There will be a need to do some similar testing shortly, in order to work out technically how to deploy UFF as user-interface default (when/if needed)---the two suggested methods either being an explicit reference to "family=Ubuntu" or the Themes, or by providing an alias for 'Sans'. If you've still got a handle on things, this would be a good next step.

For Kubuntu there are also going to be points 14a./14b. for whether or not the Kubuntu themes would switch to a default user-interface default of Ubuntu in the same timeframe window. I have mailed the Kubuntu council members collectively and it is on their Agenda for future meetings up to the release date:

  https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Meetings