Created attachment 306617 [details]
Visual representation of these glyphs, in each font in F9

Here's a PDF file containing a visual representation of these Romanian glyphs
for each X font available on my Fedora 9 system (the table was generate in
OpenOffice.org).

Er, but your pdf shows the U+015E-U+015F and U+0162-U+0163 glyphs instead of 
U+0218-U+021B. It's not really surprising then that your table is filled with 
S and T with cedilla instead of comma below...

Sorry, maybe I've generated the PDF in a wrong way (because the patch for the
keyboard is not in Fedora yet).

However, the base problem remains:

When the patch for the keyboard will be included in Fedora, Romanian writers
will want to insert the correct glyphs in their documents, i.e. the comma-below
characters. And the majority of fonts I've seend don't have these.

Also:

- (scenario 1) at install time, if Romanian language is selected during
installation, anaconda should use a default system font which has the correct
Romanian glyphs (in /etc/sysconfig/i18n).

- (scenario 2) after installation, if system-config-language is used to switch
to Romanian language (from whatever language was used before),
system-config-language should set a font that contains the correct Romanian
glyphs (comma-below).


Regards,
Răzvan

Assigning to kbd, then.

The default font (DejaVu) currently has the correct glyphs. If you'd use the 
good glyphs in your pdf you'd see most of the fonts with the comma below since 
the majority of the fonts you have in that pdf also don't have the cedilla 
glyphs either and they're falling back on DejaVu.

The question I have, is: do Romanian users expect that when they use 
U+015E-U+015F and U+0162-U+0163, they get comma below instead of cedilla?

(In reply to comment #5)
> The question I have, is: do Romanian users expect that when they use 
> U+015E-U+015F and U+0162-U+0163, they get comma below instead of cedilla?

No, they don't expect this behaviour.
Here is an image with all the fonts available in Fedora that provide the cedilla
characters: http://www.alexxed.com/node/78 . The count is 4, that is the
problem, and this bug should be filed agains each font that doesn't have those
glyphs imho.

(In reply to comment #6)
> (In reply to comment #5)
> > The question I have, is: do Romanian users expect that when they use 
> > U+015E-U+015F and U+0162-U+0163, they get comma below instead of cedilla?
> 
> No, they don't expect this behaviour.
> Here is an image with all the fonts available in Fedora that provide the cedilla
> characters

Sorry, I meant the comma characters. The s and t with cedilla is availalbe in
almost any font.

Regarding comment #4:


Bill, I don't think this historical bug should be assigned to kbd, since it will
go to a dead end - probably be forgotten. Here's why:


As far as I know, the keyboard maps for Romanian were recently fixed and should
land in Fedora from upstream. Please see
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13277


In the meantime, *until* the kbd fix shows up, we need to fix other aspects,
involving more than one component of the Fedora distro - in this logical order:


- [fonts] make sure that all Unicode fonts that can be used for Romanian
language (basically, the Latin2 subsets) contain the comma-below glyphs. (For
me, it is not so obvious *which font packages are involved*, otherwise I'll open
bugs directly on them);


- [anaconda] *after* the font issue is fixed, anaconda should set an appropriate
default font for Romanian, when Romanian language is selected during install.
For the moment, the Terminus font can be used (the terminus-font-console and
terminus-font-x11 packages);


- [system-config-language] *after* the font issue is fixed, s-c-l should set an
appropriate default font for Romanian, when Romanian language is selected as
system language. For the moment, the Terminus font can be used (the
terminus-font-console and terminus-font-x11 packages);


- [system-config-keyboard] *after* the font and the kbd issues are fixed, s-c-k
should present the user the opportunity to choose from *at least two* layouts
for Romanian keyboard, corresponding to the Primary and the Secondary
arrangements in the national standard (Secondary being the default). Please see
the separate bug #337271 .

(Hint: These two keyboard arrangements correspond to Romanian [Programmers]
(Secondary) and Romanian [Standard] in Windows Vista).


So I'm changing this to distribution again.


Thanks A LOT,
Răzvan

(In reply to comment #8)

> As far as I know, the keyboard maps for Romanian were recently fixed and should
> land in Fedora from upstream. Please see
> http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13277
> 
> In the meantime, *until* the kbd fix shows up,

The kbd fix probably does not matter. IIRC the plan for F10 is to kill kbd and
generate console layouts from xkb-config data

> - [fonts] make sure that all Unicode fonts that can be used for Romanian
> language (basically, the Latin2 subsets) contain the comma-below glyphs. (For
> me, it is not so obvious *which font packages are involved*, otherwise I'll
open bugs directly on them);

It's pretty useless to open bugs on fonts. We've spent a lot of energy kicking
non-modifiable fonts from Fedora and getting recent font tools such as fontforge
in. So interested people should just submit fixed fonts upstream instead of
waiting for someone else to fix them. 

Identifying fonts can be done this way
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/QA#Identifying_fonts

> - [anaconda] *after* the font issue is fixed, anaconda should set an
appropriate default font for Romanian,

As other explained Fedora default X11 fonts are already fine. So there is
nothing to do X11-side. Terminal-side someone should just fix latarcyrheb which
is the usual default everyone gets. Then no special selection logic will be
needed at all.

> So I'm changing this to distribution again.

This is pretty useless. Fix the problems one by one or at least report them
one-by-one (*upstream*). Multi-issue "distribution" bugs just go nowhere.

>> - [anaconda] *after* the font issue is fixed, anaconda should set an
>> appropriate default font for Romanian,

> As other explained Fedora default X11 fonts are already fine. So there is
> nothing to do X11-side. Terminal-side someone should just fix latarcyrheb which
> is the usual default everyone gets. Then no special selection logic will be
> needed at all.


@Nicholas

Dear sir, please don't close this bug without even *suggesting* a right solution
to it ! That's why it stayed around for soooo long !

The bug refers to the *fonts* part of Fedora.
And I've filed it under "distribution" because I had no clue where to address
those famous "latarcyrheb" default fonts than need to be fixed.

*Of course* I'll file separate bugs on the various tools enumerated in comment
#8 *after* I'm 100% sure that I have a default font with the comma-below glyphs.

Otherwise, we will experiment a lot of bugs and backtraces in various programs -
already happened in F7 and F8 when system was set to Romanian, because there
were no "underlaying" default fonts.


Regards,
Răzvan

Just to make things clear:

In console mode, romanian is set to use terminus font that has both cedilla and
comma characters.

In X mode, the font used is DejaVu that has both cedilla and comma characters.

So there is no problem here. Somebody should just take fontforge and add the
comma characters to the other fonts that miss those glyphs. That's in case
somebody tries to use a different font than the default one. But this has to be
done for each font upstream, as I know Fedora isn't creating fonts, but just
packages them, right ?

@ Alexandru Szasz, in comment #10 :

That's exactly what is needed. The problem (at least for me) is that:


- I don't know who is developing these fonts upstream (especially the default
"latarcyrheb", which is very important) - otherwise I would mail them directly.
And, as a final user, I have no time/willingness to "dig" - subscribe to font
mailing lists, learn technicalities about fonts, etc. 

- I'm not a developer myself (I'm a network administrator / final user). I'm
even willing to *pay* to get some coerent Romanian font support in Red
Hat/Fedora, but it still a long way to go...

- we must fix *a few* components of Fedora, among which the fonts are the first
logical stage (please see comment #8 ).


Even if my PDF in comment #1 was incorrectly generated, it still gives a good
image of what fonts are installed on a typical Red Hat/Fedora system. How we
shoud proceed to make these fonts correct for Romanian language (not only in
Fedora, but in all GNU/Linuxes)?

BTW, the Terminus fonts are technically OK, but visually pretty "thin" in
console mode. The default "latarcyrheb" is much more visible (and, IMHO,
preferable), *if* we get to fix it with comma-below glyphs.


Regards,
Răzvan

Fedora is creating some fonts like liberation and lohit, but certainly not
creating every single font we ship, and the plain truth is that language
communities that make the effort to organise themselves and submit fixes to the
fonts they're interested in upstream get better support that those that file
bugs at the wrong level and expect someone else to do the work. That's why our
script coverage is very uneven - communities that organize themselves to work on
the fonts they need get first-class multi-font support (Greeks), and sometimes
minority scripts (Armenian) are better supported than scripts used in more
populous/more rich countries. Armenians worked on the fonts they needed themselves.

@fedora we mostly focus on helping language communities help themselves, by
packaging the right font tools and only shipping fonts that can be modified by
localization groups if they need to. But we certainly do not have a font design
service today.

Răzvan: IIRC latarcyrheb is provided by kbd but it should be installed on every
system and a simple rpm query (rpm -q --whatprovides) will tell you where it's
comming from. You've been given all the info needed to identify fonts needing
work. This "distribution" bug therefore serves no purpose and won't get you any
further.

"And, as a final user, I have no time/willingness to "dig" - subscribe to font
mailing lists, learn technicalities about fonts, etc."

That's not free and open software creation works.

(In reply to comment #12)
> @ Alexandru Szasz, in comment #10 :
> 
> That's exactly what is needed. The problem (at least for me) is that:
> 
> 
> - I don't know who is developing these fonts upstream (especially the default
> "latarcyrheb", which is very important) - otherwise I would mail them directly.
> And, as a final user, I have no time/willingness to "dig" - subscribe to font
> mailing lists, learn technicalities about fonts, etc. 

I see, I'll check out how can I submit a patch to the latarcyrheb font.

> 
> - I'm not a developer myself (I'm a network administrator / final user). I'm
> even willing to *pay* to get some coerent Romanian font support in Red
> Hat/Fedora, but it still a long way to go...
> 
> - we must fix *a few* components of Fedora, among which the fonts are the first
> logical stage (please see comment #8 ).
> 
> 

From comment 8 the problems that are still there are:

- not all fonts included in Fedora have s and t with comma

I'll deal with this, not all fonts have bugzilla;

- system-config-keyboard does not allow choosing an arrangement, you can only
use the primary arrangement by selecting the language "Romanian"

This sounds like a proposal for improvement for system-config-keyboard dialog
which lacks the possibility of choosing keyboard arrangements. When I start
system-config-language it asks me to select a language, not a keyboard
arrangement. Even in the list, there are languages not keyboard arrangements. So
for this I suggest a new bug on system-config-language.