Request better Arabic font for Ubuntu 20.04

Project Discussion Desktop
28

I have thought a bit more, and made a couple of changes to the test file /etc/fonts/conf.d/69-language-selector-ar.conf. It now looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test name="lang">
            <string>ar</string>
        </test>
        <test qual="any" name="family">
            <string>sans-serif</string>
        </test>
        <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
            <string>Noto Sans Arabic</string>
            <string>Noto Sans</string>
        </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test name="lang">
            <string>ar</string>
        </test>
        <test qual="any" name="family">
            <string>ui-sans-serif</string>
        </test>
        <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
            <string>Noto Sans Arabic UI</string>
            <string>Noto Sans UI</string>
        </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="pattern">
        <test name="lang">
            <string>ar</string>
        </test>
        <test qual="any" name="family">
            <string>serif</string>
        </test>
        <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
            <string>Noto Naskh Arabic</string>
        </edit>
    </match> 
</fontconfig>

It was the Kubuntu configuration which made me reconsider a couple of things (thanks @om26er!):

  1. I replaced Noto Sans Arabic UI for the sans-serif family with Noto Sans Arabic. In the fonts-noto-ui-core package description I read:

    Noto UI fonts are for text display in UI elements
    (e.g. buttons, menus) that have a height limit.

    and it’s probably not appropriate to always use an UI font for sans-serif.

    Hopefully this change addresses the observation which @URD made about the font being a bit “artistic”.

  2. I replaced Noto Sans Arabic for the serif family with Noto Naskh Arabic.

So this is the change I’m going to make to the language-selector package if nobody objects too much. Needless to say I’d appreciate if you could test with the latest variant first.

It has been considered, and the conclusion is that doing so would be a too big change to Ubuntu short-term. So for groovy we need to stick with a solution where you either need to use Arabic as the display language or work around that requirement somehow, for instance as I suggested here.

For the future I think that Ubuntu should consider a configuration similar to what Kubuntu does. That would mean that we could offer better rendering of Arabic (and a lot of other non-latin scripts) irrespective of the locale.

2 Likes