Bug ID 1217466
Summary Missing fonts for Indic and south Asian languages.
Classification openSUSE
Product openSUSE Aeon
Version Current
Hardware Other
OS Other
Status NEW
Severity Normal
Priority P5 - None
Component Desktop Environment
Assignee rbrown@suse.com
Reporter sebastian@cozycabin.se
QA Contact qa-bugs@suse.de
Target Milestone ---
Found By ---
Blocker ---

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101
Firefox/120.0
Build Identifier: 

After installing, I noticed a lack of font support for a lot of Indic and south
Asian languages.

They are both pretty populous areas so it seems like an oversight to not
include their basic fonts in the default installation.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Firefox from Flatpak (as installed by default).
2. Go to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
3. Look at the "Other languages" box at the top of the page.
Actual Results:  
I see TOFU for several languages including Kannada.

Expected Results:  
I expected to see all languages in that box be rendered by default.

I did a bit of research, and we are talking about at least these ones, listed
in order of native speakers counted in millions (based on quick Wikipedia
data):

| Language   |   Native Speakers |    L2 Speakers |
| ---------- | -----------------:| --------------:|
| Telugu     |                83 |             13 |
| Kannada    |                44 |             15 |
| Burmese    |                33 |             10 |
| Khmer      |                17 |              1 |
| Santali    |               7.6 |              - |
| Shan       |               4.7 |              - |
| Tulu       |              1.85 |              - |
| Manipuri   |               1.8 |            1.2 |
| Tibetan    |               1.2 |              - |
| Mon        |               0.9 |              - |
| Pa'O       |              0.86 |              - |
| Dzongkha   |              ~0.2 |           ~0.4 |
| ========== | ================= | ============== |
| Total      |    196.11 million |   40.6 million |

While it would be nice to have all of them, I don't think that should be a
priority, but having at least fonts for the top ones seems reasonable.

That would be a very small impact while being very useful to a large number of
people.

Fedora for instance, have already done some of this research which we could
leverage. Which I found here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Indic_Noto_fonts

It basically would include including these fonts in the pattern, in both Sans
and Sans-Serif versions:
- google-noto-sans-bengali-vf-fonts
- google-noto-sans-devanagari-vf-fonts
- google-noto-sans-gujarati-vf-fonts
- google-noto-sans-kannada-vf-fonts
- google-noto-sans-oriya-vf-fonts
- google-noto-sans-tamil-vf-fonts
- google-noto-sans-telugu-vf-fonts

As an alternative, there is the indic-fonts package which Fedora intended to
switch away from, Zypper marks it as being only 6.2 MiB when installed. This
does not to my knowledge include fonts for Khmer or Burmese, so that would
require some additional research.

Unfortunately I don't know any of these languages so I can not comment on any
specifics when it comes to which font should be used for which language.


You are receiving this mail because: