DejaVu fonts (Was: Ethiopean)

[Albert Cahalan]

Bernardo Innocenti writes:

> 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.

(LGC means Latic,Greek,Cyrillic -- simple left-to-right stuff)

This situation is partly because the mere presense of non-LGC
characters in a font can mildly screw up the rendering of the
LGC characters. Add something like Arabic, and the kerning
gets a bit messed up for the easier languages.

It could be Pango bugs or Fontforge bugs. One could argue that
non-LGC really isn't compatible with LGC. Whatever the case,
there are problems that make full DejaVu a poor choice.

Perhaps one could ship DejaVuLGC for LGC, then use the font
set stuff (I forget the correct name) to have full DejaVu
get substituted in for the characters DejaVuLGC is lacking.