Shipping bigger fonts by default for greater glyph coverage

Daniel Drake dsd at laptop.org
Wed Sep 5 18:15:35 EDT 2012


Hi,

At the moment we ship the "Latin-Greek-Cyrillic" stripped-down version
of the DejaVu font set as our default font.

This works well for many, but doesn't include glyphs(characters) that
are important for some deployments who actively use recent OS images.
e.g. Armenia, Canada (e.g. Inuktitut glyphs).

So we're planning to ship the full DejaVu font set by default on all
platforms starting from 13.1.0. This adds a lot more glyphs and
satisifies those users, but the downside is that these fonts are
bigger (in terms of disk space used, not in terms of visual size).
This will increase the base uncompressed OS size by about 6mb.

If they want to, deployments can revert to the old/smaller font
packages with olpc-os-builder configuration, e.g.:

    [custom_packages]
    add_packages=dejavu-lgc-sans-fonts,dejavu-lgc-sans-mono-fonts,dejavu-lgc-serif-fonts
    del_packages=dejavu-sans-fonts,dejavu-sans-mono-fonts,dejavu-serif-fonts

Any objections? If not we will go ahead and make this change soon.

Thanks
Daniel



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