Description of problem: Starting with FC4 the anaconda installation offers the Amharic language translation option but no font is included to display Amharic text. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: 100% Steps to Reproduce: 1. Select Amharic during installation (am-ET) 2. 3. Actual results: boxes with character addresses. Expected results: readible characters. Additional info: An Ethiopic font needs to be available at installation time. X.org comes with a scalable Ethiopic font that can be included: http://x.hostingzero.com/X11R7.0/src/font/font-misc-ethiopic-X11R7.0-1.0.0.tar.bz2 use either GohaTibeb.otf or GohaTibeb.ttf a BDF font is also available: http://x.hostingzero.com/X11R7.0/src/font/font-mutt-misc-X11R7.0-1.0.0.tar.bz2 use cu12.bdf . Leon Ho is also familiar with the issue.
We need to ship the font in the distribution before we can add it to the install images.
Assigning to the proper team.
The ethiopic font supplied in Xorg and XFree86, has always been disabled by default in the builds. In X.Org 7.0, it is provided as well, but we have followed the upstream default of not building it by default. I've CC'd Owen Taylor to see if he's aware of any reason that enabling the Ethiopic TTF/OTF fonts supplied with X might cause. The BDF font referenced in the initial comment above, is already included in Fedora Core as far as I recall. Examine the xorg-x11-fonts package for details.
Cust a thought here. If it does make a difference, can enabling the TTF/OTF font be conditional? That is, it is only enabled if the user has selected Amharic as their installation language? I'm not clear on the run-time vs build-time differences.
(In reply to comment #4) > Cust a thought here. If it does make a difference, can enabling the TTF/OTF > font be conditional? That is, it is only enabled if the user has selected > Amharic as their installation language? I'm not clear on the run-time vs > build-time differences. The rpm packaging just packages the fonts. It's up to the installer to decide what packages end up getting installed.
I've discussed this with Owen a bit, and we've decided that we can enable the ethiopic font (.otf/.ttf) that is supplied by X.Org for testing purposes for the time being. Assuming the font works out ok, and does not regress other language installations (like some of the X.org supplied Syriac fonts have done in the past), we may be able to ship these fonts in FC5. I will enable the ethiopic font package in the next xorg-x11-fonts package rebuild, and update the report once that's complete.
The ethiopic TTF/OTF fonts are now built as part of the new subpackage xorg-x11-fonts-ethiopic Please test these fonts as much as possible both with ethiopic writing, as well as with standard English, and whatever other languages you use on a general basis. Hopefully the fonts contain no bad codepoints for other languages. Thanks in advance.