Le lundi 27 novembre 2006 à 16:58 -0500, Rik van Riel a écrit :

It looks like with all the fonts from FC6 and Fedora Extras, I can display almost every font from http://wikipedia.org/

Almost! There still appear to be 4 fonts missing from Fedora that are used on the wikipedia front page. We also lack some glyphs in for example the Canadian Aboriginal Syllable, as used by the Inuit and the Cree (and others?).

I think some of those were added to dejavu lately (the 2.12 packages in FE devel). At least there was some noise about canadian strange stuff on the irc channel, don't remember if it was merged or complete yet.

Does anybody know if there are freely redistributable fonts available that would allow us to render the remaining languages out of the box?

Please no, every new font adds a new latin/symbol block, makes the font lists in apps longer, subtly conflits in size/weight with others, and generally makes user life miserable.

(I know this is anathema for some) but the right long term solution is to create several font families with large encoding coverage, and let font tools/libs cherry pick the parts each users need, instead of having a multiple-source/style patchwork strategy (which in the end always produces patchwork-like results). There is no such thing as a langage never used in conjunction with others nowadays.

If you know of some langage communities that feel left out, please orient them to one of the big FLOSS projects out there. They can help themselves and the community in many ways :

– identify code blocks FLOSS users most care about (this is the easy part but relies 100% on someone else doing the work)

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8420

– review and comment on existing glyphs (a foreign designer can create glyphs based on its perception of existing fonts or text pictures, but only native users can identify the small variations that separate "just right" glyphs from "weird and clumsy" ones). This work is essential, does not require technical proficiency but needs motivated and patient reviewers.

(http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=36942882 as an example of such a review, unfortunately the most interesting part was not archived by sf, but it's quoted in part in the replies). Another good review is there https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8145

– make local designers aware of the FLOSS context, release existing fonts under a FLOSS license (so someone can salvage them) or (better) have them join/work with an existing team

(http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=30877284&forum_id...)

Sometimes there are local designers available but they are not confortable working in english/irc/fontforge, so they need other people to serve as proxy between them and international FLOSS teams.

– learn to design glyphs. This is not impossible, some of dejavu current designers had never done any font-related work before joining the project. I've tried to push in FE the most important tools for font work, and there are plenty easy glyphs left for beginners to try their hand on. It does require some motivation and available free time

Is anybody willing to help search?

Is this a worthy goal for Fedora Linux 7? :)

Actually we are beginning to see the fruits of the projects which set out creating large coverage fonts several years ago. They didn't get there in one Fedora release. They won't finish their work in one Fedora release. But in the end it's a hell a lot more efficient than fishing dead redistributable fonts no one is there to complete or fix.

The unicode guys are still defining new glyphs, and apps get smarter at exposing them. Suddenly glyphs few people cared about become important (you'd be surprised how even local european languages need a lot more than plain ascii these days). A font without a designer team available to plug the coverage holes (remember €) will become irrelevant mid-term, even if we can redistribute it. It's not really worth the migration pain to stuff Fedora with those.

Regards,