Re: [tlug] Browser/Font Question

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Jim Breen writes:

 > Actually wouldn't mind if fonts such as the  ttf-wqy* didn't claim to be equally
 > Japanese as Chinese.

Well, I'm sorta assuming that you can deal with this for yourself if
absolutely necessary. :-)  It's the many thousands of browser-bound
WWWJDIC users (et al) who suffer.

FWIW, I've always thought that the fontconfig people screwed the pooch
here.  They defined the lang attribute to mean those languages that
can be served by the repertoire of the font (at least, last I looked,
which was several years ago), and for most freely available fonts the
supported languages are automatically generated from the repertoire.
But even in the case of Latin characters, my understanding is that
there are visible differences in accent positioning and the like
depending on language.  So the lang attribute should include the
languages the font was designed for, and for cases where the font is
being considered as a fallback the repertoire attribute should be
consulted.

 > It's even worse for the Indians. Almost all Androids have the
 > smarts needed for rendering Indic fonts turned off.

Oh, great.  And of course you have root the system to deal with it.
And of course we can't trust ordinary users with root on their own
devices. :-(