Let selection of default fonts be based on Noto

[gunnarhj]

@vorlon

I think it’s clear that noto would be an improvement over DejaVu overall, but we should also have a goal not to introduce regressions even for subsets of our users. What steps will be taken to validate the choice of noto as the default by communities who use particular sets of glyphs? (Latin, and CJK are already addressed; but there are many distinct language communities - as you know - in India and in central and southeast Asia who should be consulted if we’re going to move them from dejavu to noto by default.)

Some more scripts have been addressed:

• Arabic (which includes Persian and Urdu) has already been discussed in considerable detail.

• Sinhala users explicitly asked for Noto.

• Amharic users explicitly asked for Noto.

And yes, in an ideal world we should make sure that all affected users agree before implementing the change. But there would be some difficulties with asking first:

• Hard to find interested Ubuntu users everywhere.

• Even harder to find such users with sufficient technical skill to be able to test without handholding.

• Please remember that since the snaps no longer rely on the system host’s /etc/fonts/conf.d, providing the proposed new font configuration in e.g. a PPA wouldn’t help much. Myself plans to use use a conventionally packaged FF to do the necessary tests before committing/uploading the changes to the system. But there will be no appropriate test environment until those changes have been mirrored in the snaps.

  The snaps in Ubuntu 22.04 currently use the font configuration from focal (this is about to be changed to jammy). The snaps in Ubuntu 23.04 and the development version currently use the font configuration from jammy.

So my thought is to be rather bold:

• Change it in 23.10 — including the snaps used in 23.10 — without asking first.

• Then, when 23.10 has been released, let’s try to reach out to the affected language communities:

  Hey, the default fonts were changed to Noto fonts in Ubuntu 23.10 for most scripts. Please upgrade to that Ubuntu version and let us know what you think, so we will be able to make possible necessary adjustments before the release of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

  (Somehing along those lines…)

@vorlon

@gunnarhj

(I’m assuming that the ubuntu-desktop package would only recommend fonts-noto-core, not depend on it.)

The ubuntu-desktop metapackage currently Depends: on fonts-dejavu-core. I’m not sure that demoting this to a Recommends: is appropriate.

The idea is to keep fonts-dejavu-core in “Depends:” for now, so it can serve as fallback, and add fonts-noto-core to “Recommends:”. Please see this comment for one reason to do it like that.