[SailfishDevel] fonts in Sailfish

[Pekka Vuorela]

On pe, 2017-05-05 at 13:43 +0300, rinigus wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am developing an application that has to have an access to the
> fonts covering all languages. While coverage of the fonts distributed
> with SFOS has improved in 2.1, I still get failure with rendering
> Sinhala in QML. Probably some other scripts are missing as well.
> 
> For technical reasons, I need to specify the fonts used for rendering
> in the program or accompanying style files. Changing that would be
> far from trivial and I would prefer to specify font paths and names
> for now when compiling program/generating styles. 
> 
> Hence my questions:
> 
> * Do we have somewhere a list of fonts that are always available on
> SFOS and their path (directories)? I could see a bunch of fonts under
> /usr/share/fonts, I presume that's all we have for now.

Yea, that's what we have.

> * Probably correct way to tackle the font rendering issue would be to
> include Noto fonts (or something similar). Ideally, it should be done
> via a separate package. I can include all the required fonts in RPM,
> but that would blow up the package probably by ~40MB in size
> (uncompressed 52MB, zip compressed 42MB). Sounds a bit like a waste
> of bandwidth, but probably the only way to do that in agreement with
> the Harbour policies. Jolla, any plans to include Noto (or similar)
> fonts into SFOS distribution? Or changes in policies allowing us to
> push fonts to the devices?

While font coverage is slowly getting better, there are unfortunately
still lot of scripts missing. What we've added has been done with the
aim to have it mixing nicely with existing fonts, sometimes making
small adjustments here and there.

Including a big set of Noto fonts or similar is not in the plans right
now, would require quite a bunch of fonts. The best thing for you could
be just including custom fonts in the application if those are needed.

If there are certain scripts people would really like to have, would be
good to have votes on together.jolla.com.