pruning the fonts list

Oron Peled oron at actcom.co.il
Sat Apr 19 08:31:56 UTC 2008


[cross-posting to an Israeli Group of Linux Users.
 IGLU readers, please read and send me your feedback.
 A concrete information (specific apps, toolkits, specific
 characters/nikud) would help us form a valid opinion]

On Saturday, 19 בApril 2008, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le vendredi 18 avril 2008 à 15:57 -0400, Bill Nottingham a écrit :
> > When looking over the LiveCD manifest, and where space is going, I
> > can't help but notice that a lot of it goes to fonts. Here's the
> > full list, AFAICT. The number to the left is the size of the package.
> > I think a good chunk of this could be pruned.
> 
> My advice would be:
> ...
> 4. drop culmus — DejaVu full includes Hebrew no one complained of during
> the F9 cycle, so no need to keep a separate Hebrew font on a
> space-constrained media

If DejaVu provides "good-enough" substitute for space limited media,
than it may be OK. However, it should be noted that culmus became the
standard Hebrew font for Linux. Every FAQ out there point to culmus for
getting high quality Hebrew desktop and people got used to expect it
from their distros.

Fedora didn't have any Hebrew localization team until about three
weeks ago and we now have a single translator (me), which explain
why you didn't get any feedback earlier.

However, we do have a lot of Hebrew support from upstream (Mozilla,
OO.org, Gnome, KDE). A basic font change affect *all* of them.

I (like most Hebrew users) didn't use DejaVu for Hebrew until now.
Because of the time constraints I'll try and have some basic testing
in the next few days, to see if DejaVu provides reasonable substitute
for culmus in LiveCD's.

I'm cross posting this to our local mailing list, so I can get further
feedback quickly and summarize our position.

> I'm afraid most wins are in 3. 5. 6. & 7., and they depend on l10n
> groups telling us their wishes, which unfortunately has not happened a
> lot so far. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Triaging/L10N
> remains terribly incomplete.

Thanks for pointing this link. I'll use it to fill our summary (probably
next week).


-- 
Oron Peled                             Voice/Fax: +972-4-8228492
oron at actcom.co.il                  http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron
ICQ UIN: 16527398

"Debugging is at least twice as hard as writing the program in the 
first place.  So if your code is as clever as you can possibly make 
it, then by definition you're not smart enough to debug it." 
                                                 -- Brian Kernighan




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