Polish fonts missing some characters

[Krzysztof Lichota]

I have tried installing Kubuntu Breezy preview (daily build 20050902).
I have chosen Polish locale and most of Polish characters (but not all) are showing as rectangles.
This is because default font (Bitstream Vera Sans) does not contain them.

Default font should be switched to support Polish characters. Suse uses "Sans serif" and it is very good, but
it is not installed in Ubuntu. "Free sans" is installed and has the necessary characters, but it is not as
well looking as "Sans serif" from Suse.

[Krzysztof Lichota (krzysiek-launchpad-ubuntu-com)]

Changing severity to "major" as it deters Polish users from Kubuntu.

[Krzysztof Lichota (krzysiek-launchpad-ubuntu-com)]

Created an attachment (id=3540)
Screenshot of menu with missing characters

This is screenshot of missing characters in menu, but they are missing
everywhere, not only in menu.

In particular, they are missing also from KDE splash screen and it is not fixed
by setting fonts to some fonts supporting Polish characters in KControl "fonts"
module.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Changing the default font is not a good option; currently Vera provides the best
coverage for many character sets. My understanding is that the system should
fall back to other fonts if the necessary characters are not available, though.

[Jonathan Riddell (jr)]

Apparantly Qt3 only does font substitution if a whole character set is missing from the font.
With Polish and other eastern European fonts it has enough of the character set from Vera that
it doesn't bother finding substitutions for the missing characters. You can get round this by
installing a more complete font such as the Vera variant DejaVu (the ttf-dejavu package from
Debian unstable installs fine) and setting that as default.

[Krzysztof Lichota (krzysiek-launchpad-ubuntu-com)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Apparantly Qt3 only does font substitution if a whole character set is missing from the
font.
> With Polish and other eastern European fonts it has enough of the character set from Vera
that
> it doesn't bother finding substitutions for the missing characters. You can get round this
by
> installing a more complete font such as the Vera variant DejaVu (the ttf-dejavu package
from
> Debian unstable installs fine) and setting that as default.
>

Yes, but I am not looking for workaround, but for solution which will work out-of-the-box, so
that I can give Kubuntu to newbies.
Maybe it would be possible to install that font and change it to default in case someone
installs Polish locale?

[Jonathan Riddell (jr)]

Agreed, I've asked for it to be brought in from Debian.

[Krzysztof Lichota (krzysiek-launchpad-ubuntu-com)]

Still present in Kubuntu 5.10 Preview.

[Krzysztof Lichota (krzysiek-launchpad-ubuntu-com)]

Looks like it is fixed in Kubuntu 5.10 official release. Thanks! :)

[Tomasz Czapiewski (xeros)]

I experience the same problem with Kubuntu Feisty after upgrade from Edgy. Some of the Polish characters are visible as rectangles just like on the screenshot from Breezy. That's with the default fonts: Serif and Sans Serif and many others - I had to change fonts to Lucida Sans or some others, which do have all Polish characters.

[LimCore (limcore)]

I confirm....

some fonts, including Bitstream have trouble with some polish characters like
ó (it should be o with `)

others have trouble with ż (z with a dot on top).

There are like 12 glyphs to do, how they could not get it right?!

Plus, I seen this problem on Debian for like a year and I see it even today....