I wonder if instead we need to have a way not to have them on the DVD, we have had some bugreports about not including glyphs for all languages and in a "Fonts" pattern providing one good quality font for all languages does seem reasonable (The Adobe fonts still miss some languages).

Fabian Vogt (favogt) - about 2 years ago

author

The DVD is not the issue, it's about default installs.

Fabian Vogt (favogt) - about 2 years ago

author

You can have locale-dependent recommends, like: Recommends: (noto-serif-ethiopic-fonts if namespace:language(gez))

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Simon Lees (simotek) - about 2 years ago

target maintainer

Yes, but some of the issues here are from multi language users who may prefer to have there system in say English but then still send the occasional email or work on a document in an additional language. In which case this doesn't always work and there end user perspective was that if they install the "Fonts" pattern they should atleast get a font that works for there native language.

So it probably more leads us to the question of how many fonts do we actually need in the default install. For many English speaking people 3 is probably enough (sans, serif, mono), but then most desktops probably still pull in the Office pattern and I could see some of those users wanting a little more then that so it probably makes sense for the office and graphics patterns to pull in the fonts pattern which doesn't really fix the default install issue.

I guess a solution could be a new Extended or Enhanced Fonts pattern or even an all languages font pattern that isn't installed by default but gives people after fonts for multiple languages or designers who want a larger selection of fonts then what we put in the default install an option to have a larger variety. Let me look at this kind of idea tomorrow its 11pm now

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Fabian Vogt (favogt) - about 2 years ago

author

Can we get the revert forwarded now and then work on a better solution? Currently installing or updating TW ends up with >220 packages and >500MiB of noto fonts!

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Takashi Iwai (tiwai) - about 2 years ago

target maintainer

Traditionally we have already multi-locale setups, and you can use English as primary locale while others as secondary. In that way, the locale-dependent CJK packages could be installed automatically.

I wonder if switching Noto Fonts to Variable could help with this. As variable fonts take up significantly less space compared to hinted ttf. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/166953

One concern is that some users don't like the look of variable fonts as they aren't hinted the same way ttf hinted fonts are. Here is the bug report of what happened when I tried to switch to unhinted otfs to reduce package sizes. Its relevant to KDE so its neat that favogt is here in this conversation. https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1199938

Edit: Another concern is that because Google only made Variable fonts for some of the scripts, the rest will need to be unhinted otfs. So this adds even more complexity to the shell script I use to generate the specfile.

Gordon Leung (Pi-Cla) - about 2 years ago

Another possible change is to only include fonts that are of "living" scripts, since a bunch of the Noto Fonts are fonts of historical scripts. I initially hesitated to do this to simplify packaging on my end, but if it needs to be done I guess I can do it.

Here is a website of unicode scripts which includes a "status" button which divides the scripts into "Living" and "Historical". https://www.worldswritingsystems.org/

Btw, noto-sans-cjk-fonts is exactly the same as Adobe Source Han Sans, its just that Adobe and Google collaborated on making those fonts so they have two different names. I wonder why despite Adobe Source Sans being the default font for openSUSE that Adobe Source Han Sans was not included before I made this change. I selected the Noto package over the Adobe package as the maintainer of the Noto CJK packages had both the serif and sans-serif already updated whereas Source Han only had the Sans package updated. (I wonder if maybe Adobe Source Han should just be an alternate name for the Noto package...)

Edit: Oh yeah, I also included them as noto-sans-cjk-fonts is already included in patterns-gnome-gnome_x11and I figured I did not want to make an SR to the Adobe packages just to include them

Gordon Leung (Pi-Cla) - about 2 years ago

Also, noto-sans-cjk-fonts already compromises quite a bit to save storage space. It only has the sans-serif versions of the CJK fonts and only the Regular and Bold weights for them. So unlike fonts in noto-fonts, it only has two weights and is only sans-serif.

If somehow it needs to be slimmed down further I guess someone can dive into this catalogue of options: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-cjk/tree/main/Sans#downloading-noto-sans-cjk there is a lot on offer including variable options. Currently our Noto CJK package uses non-variable OTFs only.

Ping

Thanks!