Re: [sinhala-technical] LKLUG Font Update and Packaging Abhaya for Linux

[Harshula <har...@gm...>]

Hi Pathum,

On 25/09/15 22:35, Pathum Egodawatta wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 7:23 PM Harshula <har...@gm...
> <mailto:har...@gm...>> wrote:
>     On 23/09/15 02:08, Pathum Egodawatta wrote:

>      > Packaging Abhaya Libre would be the immediate solution.
>
>     It can be packaged. However, before it becomes the default font, it
>     needs to be more legible than LKLUG, GNU Free Font and Bhashitha. It's
>     vertical height seems insufficient. It's also a bit heavy visually.
>
> Naturally Abhaya is not ideal as a  UI font. But packaging it for
> rendering Sinhala properly is a good move. Maybe a ppa with all the
> available FOSS licensed sinhala fonts that would drop them to  ~/.fonts/
>   is something I would love to see. That way we can push updates and
> improvements to the fonts too :)

1) ~/.fonts/ ($HOME/.fonts/) is a location in a user's home directory 
where the user can put new fonts and make them available to applications 
the user runs. There is no need for distro packaging in this scenario. 
You could create a zip or tarball right now and distribute it with 
instructions to cp the fonts to ~/.fonts/ & run fc-cache -vf .

Installing a distro packaged font makes it available system-wide. This 
is ideal for UI fonts. It's also useful in scenarios where versioning 
and dependencies are important.

>     What are you thoughts on the Noto Sinhala font?
>
> Noto is the best available UI font at the moment. Its Apache licensed
> though. I think its compatible. There are some issues with the shapes.
> But it is much better than LKLUG for UI.

The Apache license is acceptable to Linux distros. Please let us know 
the problems with the Noto glyphs so that we may try to get them resolved.

Do you have plans on developing a Sinhala font for UIs? Let me know, I'd 
be interested in packaging it for Debian.


Hi Danishka,

Perhaps it's time we look into changing the dependency of the Sinhala 
language package to depend on Noto instead of LKLUG in Fedora & Debian?

cya,
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