Created attachment 373045 [details] Screenshot for Font GUI in Hindi (hi_IN) locale Description of problem: All languages using Lohit as default font, instead of latin characters, boxes appear on the FontGUI. Attached screenshot for Hindi (hi_IN) and Malayalam (ml_IN) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.4.3-2.fc12 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Login to any indic locale using Lohit as the default font eg: Hindi, Marathi, Bengali-India etc 2. Go to System->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts 3. Check the font displayed, all boxes appear instead of English alphabets Actual results: Reproducing above steps, you see only boxes. Expected results: Reproducing above steps, latin characters must appear. Additional info: As Malayalam uses smc-meera-fonts as default font, this issue is not present in ml locale. Screenshot attached
Created attachment 373046 [details] Screenshot for FontGUI on Malayalam (ml_IN) Attaching screenshot for Malayalam which has default font = smc-meera-fonts
i have filed upstream bug for this lets see what happens there https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=602694
When wanting to check for the presence or the absence of this bug in a different language locale, rather than going through the procedure of a log-out and the log back in with another locale, it is more convenient to just launch from a terminal the gnome-appearance-properties applet together with the export of LANG environment variable set to the relevant language For e.g., for Tamil,regardless of with which language locale the current session is being run, from a terminal launch the applet with the following command export LANG=ta_IN && gnome-appearance-properties Similarly the applet can be launched for any number of other languages from the different required number of terminals. They can be viewed simultaneously for making comparisons. I made the following screen-shot in Fedora 11 wherein the 3 shown simultaneous instances of the gnome-appearance-properties are for US English (LANG= en_US.UTF-8), Tamil LANG=ta_IN) and Kannada (LANG=kn_IN) : http://sites.google.com/site/skhome/fedorarelate/screen/appear-pref-serif-Lohit-buggy.png The additional image in the same screen-shot is a gnome-terminal in which I had checked which fonts Fontconfig had matched for the generic font "serif" in case of each of the 3 languages. It is the "serif" (as I have empirically found and proved to myself) that is used for those sample glyphs cages in the "Appearance Preferences" dialog. The fact that whenever the Fontconfig framework has to match a font lacking the Latin range glyphs to "serif" this bug being caused to occur, points to two possibilities. First and more likely cause is that the applet could be faulty in that while making a font match it is not passing to Fontconfig the correct information that the sample glyph data are only fixed ascii range codes meant to be Latin characters only and not as per the language locale in use. The other possibility is the sample data is up for l10n translations which have not been carried out and the Latin data are repeated falsely for each language. I haven't checked the source codes and my conjecture are speculative. Well, hopefully upstream fixing would solve this bug once and for all. However I like to suggest that it is better to also include Latin range glyphs (at least English) in all Lohit fonts to make them more competitive in the field. ~Sethu
right now i dont feel any need for adding latin alphabet in lohit font, since corresponding latin alphabet fonts are matching with its style, but yeah it will be definitely advantages thing to existing lohit. may be long term we can think for this. about the bug its really need to fix from control-center component as mentioned in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=602694 moving to control-center
From reading the upstream report, it sounds like behdad is on the case. I'm not going to work on this in the near term, so i'm going to close this out UPSTREAM.