DejaVu fonts (Was: Ethiopean)

[Bernardo Innocenti]

(I'm moving to devel@ so we don't need to Cc too many people)

Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
> > I cannot tell you which font was used by my Ubuntu - I just see those
> > glyphs rendered more of less correctly (see attached). If you're
> > interested, I can provide you with the list of fonts I have installed.
>
> I see them just fine in Firefox on my F7 development machine, but not on
> the laptop.  Weird...

It turns out that the DejaVu font has the Ethiopian glyphs, but
there's also a simplified font called DejaVuLGC which is what
we're shipping on the OLPC.

I just talked with Walter and J5 and we agreed that it makes no sense
to ship a huge font with all glyphs when we're already going to have
a custom images for each country where we can easily add language
specific fonts.

But now I looked at DejaVu to see how bigger it is and it seems to
me that it's not worth it after all:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 448K 2007-08-11 07:42 DejaVuLGCSans.ttf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 557K 2007-08-11 07:42 DejaVuSans.ttf

The RPMs for the complete DejaVu font are even *smaller*:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.0M 2007-08-11 07:43 dejavu-fonts-2.19-1.fc8.noarch.rpm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.3M 2007-08-11 07:42 dejavu-lgc-fonts-2.19-1.noarch.rpm

(but that's because DejaVuLGC also comes with Condensed variants).

So, is there another reason why we couldn't just switch to it?
Currently, we're shipping arabic and thai fonts in all builds.
If the DejaVu support for these languages is good enough, we
could save even more space.

-- 
   // Bernardo Innocenti
 \X/  http://www.codewiz.org/