Description of problem: I installed Fedora 17 on my laptop. I tried to access the article "Aramaic language" in the English Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_language ). It showed the name of the language in its own script as squares, because the font for that script is not installed by default. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fedora 17. How reproducible: Always. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install Fedora with the Gnome desktop. 2. Use Firefox to go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amire80/Fedora_fonts . 3. Check whether the line that says "Aramaic" has Syriac letters. If it has squares or numbers, then the font is not installed. Actual results: The line shows squares. Expected results: The lines is supposed to show Syriac letters. Additional info: If you go to the Wikipedia in the Syriac language, Fedora proposes to install the relevant package, possibly because the relevant characters appear in the window title.
Installing the GNU Free Fonts solved this. Is there any chance to have it installed by default?
CC'ing some font gurus - it's a trivial change to flip gnu-free-*-fonts from optional to default/mandatory in @fonts, but I don't know what side effects it might have.
*** Bug 868551 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 868560 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 868562 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
In principle I am always in favour of increasing our default fonts coverage, so sounds like a good idea to me - we just need to do some testing to make sure it doesn't have any adverse affects - otherwise perhaps their fontconfig conf files might need some small tweaking. Maybe just installing gnu-free-sans-fonts by default would be enough for now?
> Maybe just installing gnu-free-sans-fonts by default would be enough for now? Actually gnu-free-serif-fonts seems to have more coverage: eg 'dv' and 'got'. Amazing! After installing it there are no more missing glyph boxes on http://www.wikipedia.org/ ! :-) +1
Actually looking at http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/coverage.html it is probably best to make all 3 fonts default (Sans, Serif, and Mono) since they all have some unique coverage.
No real coverage for Aramaic in fontconfig and maybe a locale for that too? that would be first step to go. otherwise it may be hard to figure out side effects etc and a solution/workaround if any.
I checked "fc-match -s :lang=xx" (or xx-yy) for all Fedora fonts with entries in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ after 67-gnu-free*.conf and didn't notice any ill effects. Given that GNU Free's fontconfig files are just generic fallback alias I don't see any obvious problem with adding them as default fonts (unlike some others, like DroidSans* perhaps). I think it would be great to have glyph coverage for Dhivehi and other scripts that we are currently missing out of the box. And now seems the last chance to do this before F18 Beta. If there should be any problems we can certainly revert back before F18 Final without any major loss since it is just a fallback font.
Okay I also tested all those langs with "FC_LANG=xx[-yy] fc-match -s" which gives more correct generic answers, and got similar reasonable cleaner results. I went ahead and committed the changes to comps for f18 and f19 so that wider testing can be done. https://fedorahosted.org/comps/changeset/a8b31739600af21cc7c63baee9d78b571f889ec7
(In reply to comment #10) > I think it would be great to have glyph coverage for Dhivehi > and other scripts that we are currently missing out of the box. > And now seems the last chance to do this before F18 Beta. > If there should be any problems we can certainly revert back before > F18 Final without any major loss since it is just a fallback font. GNU Free font has good coverage but a bad reputation quality-side. If it's added it needs to be added after everything else to avoid stomping on fonts with better glyphs. I don't remember if there are other good syriac fonts out there (I'd be really surprised if SIL didn't cover them given their Christian/Bible orientation) but IIRC the authoritative free/open fonts for cherokee and other native american scripts are those published by languagegeek http://www.languagegeek.com/font/fontdownload.html
(In reply to comment #12) > GNU Free font has good coverage but a bad reputation quality-side. At least recently there has been work to improve them. > If it's added it needs to be added after everything else to avoid > stomping on fonts with better glyphs. Okay I opened bug 869224 to have its priority lowered. Though any better fonts should really be have lang conf (with higher priority) which should make them override anyway. > I don't remember if there are other good syriac fonts out there (I'd be > really surprised if SIL didn't cover them given their Christian/Bible > orientation) but IIRC the authoritative free/open fonts for cherokee and > other native american scripts are those published by languagegeek > http://www.languagegeek.com/font/fontdownload.html I am not sure if there are any other fonts providing Dhivehi. Anyway I am happy to drop the default once we have coverage by better native fonts. Until then GNU Free still seem to be good generic fallback fonts.
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 19 development cycle. Changing version to '19'. (As we did not run this process for some time, it could affect also pre-Fedora 19 development cycle bugs. We are very sorry. It will help us with cleanup during Fedora 19 End Of Life. Thank you.) More information and reason for this action is here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora19