Font problems (affecting Java and others?)

[Alan Eliasen]

Michael Stone wrote:
> Alan,
> 
> Thanks very much for the detailed writeup of your findings (and for your
> efforts make OLPC's software distribution more friendly to people who
> like Java). I can't personally resolve any of the questions which you
> raise with any authority but I can direct you toward the people who
> might be able to -- those people tend to live in #fedora-devel and on
> fedora-devel-list at redhat.com might. (In particular, you'll find the
> Fedora OpenJDK packagers among them.)

    Thanks for the suggestions.  So is all RPM packaging done by the Red
Hat team?  Do we have any control about what shows up in those
repositories?  That is, if we have a patch specific to the OLPC, are we
dependent on Red Hat to approve/reject it and get it incorporated?

    I'll also pose a few related questions that pertain to OLPC
philosophy, and not Red Hat philosophy:

    1.)  Is the OLPC expected to contain at least one font containing a
glyph for all Unicode characters?  Right now, I'm not sure we even have
one complete font, even if we pick and choose between fonts.

     This affects many Activities; I tried to show people one of my web
pages (using the Browse activity) that tests your recognition of Chinese
numbers, and none of the glyphs for the Chinese characters appeared,
indicating that we have font problems even in the Browse utility.  See
http://futureboy.us/fsp/chinesenumbers.fsp and
http://futureboy.us/fsp/ChineseWorksheetGenerator.fsp  And I know
Firefox tries *hard* to find fonts with glyphs for each character it
displays, and succeeds well on most operating systems.

    It would seem that a world-friendly OS should contain at least one
font with glyphs for the majority of Unicode codepoints, or at least a
bunch of fonts that can be searched for a glyph.  This affects language
learning and makes or breaks applications.

    2.) If internationalized applications like Java or GTK or Browse
have pointers to font files that are missing, is it considered an OLPC
bug that we forgot to distribute those files?  Or considered a bug in
that Java distribution that needs to point at the fonts we already have?
  What if they're incomplete?  Or is it a space-saving consideration?
Or a free font availability consideration?  If it's one of the latter,
do we declare that we won't fully internationalize so platforms like
Java and internationalized applications (like Browse) will be forever
broken?

    3.) Should it be considered a bug if an existing, central
application like Browse or Firefox can't find a glyph for many Unicode
codepoints, and thus fails to display many languages?  Or do we just
ship the fonts most used in our customer countries?  (The latter seems a
bit cynical... :) )

    By the way, I've made a major rewrite to the Java page of the Wiki,
hoping to bring it up to date, and provide links to Java-blocking bugs,
Java issues, benefits of Java, and my own research into improving Java
footprint and usability.  Updates or discussion are highly welcomed.
See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Java

-- 
   Alan Eliasen              |  "Furious activity is no substitute
   eliasen at mindspring.com    |    for understanding."
   http://futureboy.us/      |           --H.H. Williams


-- 
   Alan Eliasen              |  "Furious activity is no substitute
   eliasen at mindspring.com    |    for understanding."
   http://futureboy.us/      |           --H.H. Williams