Shipping bigger fonts by default for greater glyph coverage

[Chris Leonard]

On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 6:15 PM, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> 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.


Another bit of good news is that these three expanded DejaVu font sets
each include a glyph for the ʻokina <U+02BB>.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOkina

http://www.dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/PDF_samples

This is important for some languages of Oceania (Tongan and Samoan).
I've managed to get a Samoan L10n effort started and knowing that the
ʻokina glyph will be properly presented is reassuring.

cjl