Hi, On Saturday, July 16th, 2022 at 3:50 AM, Fuminobu TAKEYAMA <ftake@geeko.jp> wrote:
On 2022/07/16 7:07, Gordon Leung wrote:
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.
I downloaded and unzipped 04_NotoSansCJK-OTF.zip at https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/M17N:fonts/google-noto-sans-cjk-font.... Then ran: `fc-scan OTF/SimplifiedChinese/NotoSansCJKsc-Regular.otf | rg "Noto Sans SC"`, (rg is ripgrep aka faster grep) and got nothing. Then I ran `fc-scan OTF/SimplifiedChinese/NotoSansCJKsc-Regular.otf | rg "Noto Sans CJK SC"` and it returned: family: "Noto Sans CJK SC"(s) fullname: "Noto Sans CJK SC"(s) So it seems that the Language Specific fonts we have been shipping also only contain the Noto Sans CJK JP/SC/TC/KR family. I also tried this with the mono zip files and same thing. This makes me think that this is no longer an issue, as no one seems to have reported any breakage from us shipping fonts that have only the Noto Sans CJK JP/SC/TC/KR family. Maybe this means we can do without the language specific fonts? (or we can always just ship both the language specific variable fonts and the variable OTC)
Best, Fuminobu TAKEYAMA
You too, Gordon Leung