Hi, It's interesting. I will test variable-weight fonts correctly works with applications on openSUSE.
P.S: A part of me wonders if maybe we should even go one step further and not even bother with Language-specific fonts. Instead, only ship the Variable OTC which is roughly the same size as an Language-specific Variable Font anyways.
FYI: https://github.com/openSUSE/fonts-config/issues/6 You can find the reason in changelog or M17N list. At that time, there were some applications which cannot pick correct glyphs according to the current locale, especially on Chinese environment. Such applications tend to pick Japanese glyph instead of Simplified Chinese one in alphabetical order. This is the reason we migrated to the language specific version. However, I don't know (and nobody answers) the concrete name of such applications. So we are not sure this problem still exists. There is another motivation to back to the non language-specific OTC version. Their family name is different: Language specific: Noto Sans JP/SC/TC/KR Non language-specific: Noto Sans CJK JP/SC/TC/KR It seems that the latter one is common in the community. So some applications expect "Noto Sans CJK JP" not "Noto Sans JP", which requires manual installation of the CJK version. Best, Fuminobu TAKEYAMA On 2022/07/16 7:07, Gordon Leung wrote:
Hi,
I have been looking at variable fonts for Noto CJK: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-cjk/blob/main/Sans/README.md <https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-cjk/blob/main/Sans/README.md> and I noticed that Variable Noto Sans CJK Japanese font actually takes up less space than the Non-Variable CJK Noto Sans Japanese Regular font + Non-Variable CJK Noto Sans Japanese Bold font. As variable fonts encode all weights, this means even if I only just wanted the Regular and Bold weights for Noto Sans CJK Japanese, it would be more space efficient for me to install the variable font. (while I also get the benefit of having many extra weights)
So I think we should just replace weight specific Noto CJK packages with Variable fonts, as there is not much point in getting specific weights when the variable fonts are so small.
Let me know what you think, Gordon Leung
P.S: A part of me wonders if maybe we should even go one step further and not even bother with Language-specific fonts. Instead, only ship the Variable OTC which is roughly the same size as an Language-specific Variable Font anyways.