Default font: Transition from DejaVu to Noto

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Hi!

With fontconfig 2.14, which entered testing last January, upstream
fontconfig prefers Noto over DejaVu in /etc/fonts/conf.d/60-latin.conf.
The change was not preceded by any discussion I'm aware of. It appears
to be related to this Fedora measure:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultToNotoFonts

So Debian was kind of caught off guard.

My personal view is that it is a change in the right direction, and I
have taken a couple of follow-up steps in Debian. There are still loose
ends and more work to be done to achieve a consistent configuration in
this respect. However, before taking further steps, I feel there is a
need to reach out to a broader audience about the change. Hence this
message. Basically I'm asking if this move towards Noto is desirable
and, if so, I plea for relevant input for the completion of the transition.

While this message was crossposted to several mailing lists, since the
topic affects multiple packages and teams, I suggest that the replies
are posted to the general debian-devel list only.


The current situation
---------------------
From a Debian POV, the effective default font for sans-serif and serif
depends on whether the fonts-noto-core package is installed or not. For
some desktop environments that package is pulled by default. As regards
the GNOME desktop, fonts-noto-core is not installed by default with
Debian 12 stable, but it does get pulled if you install trixie via a
weekly build ISO.

The change as regards GNOME is probably my fault:

https://salsa.debian.org/freedesktop-team/fontconfig/-/commit/5aa10dde

While I thought that that commit wouldn't change much in practice, since
there typically are other fonts which satisfy the fontconfig-config
alternative dependency list, it probably does make a difference since
fontconfig is installed early during the installation process.

Some bugs were filed early this year, where people expressed some
dissatisfaction. The strongest objections were about the change of the
monospace font. (fonts-noto-mono is included by default also in Debian
12 stable with GNOME.) So I addressed that in trixie via a Debian level
patch which changes the default monospace font back to DejaVu Sans Mono.

So at this time we have these preferences in 60-latin.conf:

sans-serif Noto Sans
serif Noto Serif
monospace DejaVu Sans Mono

So far so good. Mostly good IMHO. I can mention that I'm also working
with fonts in Ubuntu, and similar changes will happen in Ubuntu 23.10.


Some steps to consider
----------------------
These are some points for consideration I have in mind:

* The task-* packages should be reconsidered. At first hand I'm thinking
of all the non-latin task-* packages which recommend a particular font.
Let's take task-hindi-desktop as an example, which currently recommends
fonts-lohit-deva. I think it would be consistent to change that to:

Recommends: fonts-noto-core | fonts-lohit-deva

fonts-noto-core covers "all" scripts, so with that package installed
there shouldn't be a need to install fonts-lohit-deva. (And for many
non-latin scripts Noto offers better quality than the other non-latin
font packages in the archive.)

* Maybe it would be motivated to recommend fonts-noto-core in the
umbrella package task-desktop too. While fontconfig-config seems to pull
fonts-noto-core for new installs, I suspect that it wouldn't be pulled
during an upgrade to Debian trixie.

* System admins have the option to do "dpkg-reconfigure
fontconfig-config" and that way control some fontconfig symlinks
affecting things like hinting and subpixel rendering. As regards the
related templates file I recently made a tiny change that appeared to be
necessary:

https://salsa.debian.org/freedesktop-team/fontconfig/-/commit/45d8eda0

but I suspect that the feature may need an overhaul also in other
respects if we change the default font.

* I've noticed the fonts-recommended bug
https://bugs.debian.org/1051314, which rightly points out the need to
consider Noto in that context.

* Almost 3 years have passed since the fonts-noto source package was
last updated from upstream. A new update with latest upstream is desirable.


Looking forward to your response.

--
Cheers,
Gunnar Hjalmarsson

[G Karunakar]

On Sun, 10 Sept 2023 at 02:57, Gunnar Hjalmarsson <gunn...@debian.org> wrote:

Hi!

With fontconfig 2.14, which entered testing last January, upstream
fontconfig prefers Noto over DejaVu in /etc/fonts/conf.d/60-latin.conf.
The change was not preceded by any discussion I'm aware of. It appears
to be related to this Fedora measure:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultToNotoFonts

So Debian was kind of caught off guard.

This is in line with the consistent pattern of making changes without much user consultation in that world.

Seems change relates to giving a consistent look n feel, by using the same font family across scripts.

Since its been a while since this mail , I only want to respond to specific example picked.

 

My personal view is that it is a change in the right direction, and I
have taken a couple of follow-up steps in Debian. There are still loose
ends and more work to be done to achieve a consistent configuration in
this respect. However, before taking further steps, I feel there is a
need to reach out to a broader audience about the change. Hence this
message. Basically I'm asking if this move towards Noto is desirable
and, if so, I plea for relevant input for the completion of the transition.

<snip>

----------------------

These are some points for consideration I have in mind:

* The task-* packages should be reconsidered. At first hand I'm thinking
of all the non-latin task-* packages which recommend a particular font.
Let's take task-hindi-desktop as an example, which currently recommends
fonts-lohit-deva. I think it would be consistent to change that to:

Recommends: fonts-noto-core | fonts-lohit-deva

fonts-noto-core covers "all" scripts, so with that package installed
there shouldn't be a need to install fonts-lohit-deva. (And for many
non-latin scripts Noto offers better quality than the other non-latin
font packages in the archive.)

While above should be fine technically for Hindi desktop to be viewable,

but as a user I would expect additional fonts that are available get installed too, fonts-lohit-deva , fonts-deva etc.

Even though these extra fonts would not be used for desktop itself, and only in say LibreOffice.

 

Karunakar