@xlmnxp: Hmm… This is tricky for me, who don’t speak Arabic and hence have no own idea of which one looks best.
We are talking about which font is the best for the most important family sans-serif. You say that Noto Sans Arabic is huge, and @URD found Noto Sans Arabic UI a bit artistic.
What I see is that UI fonts are not really intended for general sans-serif use, and I also see that Kubuntu chose Noto Sans Arabic. Would it possibly be easier to reach consensus about Noto Naskh Arabic also for sans-serif?
Input from more Arabic speaking users about this choice would be highly desirable.
I noticed your comment in the video that the non-UI font requires more space at top and bottom. My understanding is that that is the intended difference between the two variants; hence the UI font is recommended for buttons and menus while the non-UI one is thought to be used more generally.
The problem here is that most GUI software probably does not make use of any ui-sans-serif font family (which is a new invention) and uses whatever font is specified for sans-serif.
If there proves to be a consensus among Arabic speaking users that Noto Sans Arabic UI is the best one as a general sans-serif font, then let’s pick that one.
Looking forward to know about the feedback you get.
As input from more Arabic speakers was requested, I am the author of one of the original blog articles on hsoub.com references by xlmnxp in the original post. Since Ubuntu 16.04 the Arabic rendering of dejavu has become really unbearable for me I have left Ubuntu since then and came back in release 18.04 only to find the problem persisted, but thanks to some research I managed to circumvent the font by using gnome extensions, release 20.04 seems to have fixed a long lasting issue from 18.04 where changing the interface font in gnome tweaks did not affect browser tabs, that problem seems to now have been fixed. While fonts like noto naskh are very beautiful in Arabic, their English rendering is not so much polished, therefore I recommend trying Dubai Font which has both and Arabic and English renderings which are equally impressive.
Indeed there are ways for a user to customize fonts. This discussion is merely about providing a better default for Arabic speaking users.
You say that Noto Naskh isn’t excellent for rendering latin scripts. The main option discussed so far in this thread is Noto Sans. Do you have an opinion on that?
My understanding is that a font like Noto Sans Arabic can (or should) be combined with Noto Sans, and with that offer good rendering of both English and Arabic.
I had a look at the Dubai Font, and AFAICT it’s not free software, and if so it’s not an option for Ubuntu to provide by default. (It seems not to be packaged in the Debian/Ubuntu archives, and the lack of a FOSS license may be the reason for that.)
My understanding is that a font like Noto Sans Arabic can (or should) be combined with Noto Sans , and with that offer good rendering of both English and Arabic
If this can be achieved, then it would be fantastic, Noto Sans for Latin fonts is excellent (in my opinion, fonts are highly subjective matter) but not for Arabic fonts as it defaults to Dejavu, Noto Sans Arabic is great for Arabic but not so much for Latin, so if there’s a way to combine both where Noto Sans can handle Latin text and Noto Sans Arabic can handle Arabic text then that would be ideal in my opinion. Thank you for looking into this.
The idea is to give both Noto Sans Arabic and Noto Sans higher precedence than DejaVu Sans for Arabic users (the latter defined as users who are using an Arabic locale).
It will be easier to talk about this when I have uploaded the related changes to the language-selector package. Then people will be able to simply update and test for themselves, and possible modifications can be made. But before I do that, there is a pending item which @xlmnxp is investigating: Should we use the basic Noto Sans Arabic font or the Noto Sans Arabic UI variant.
Ok, I think I will upload a change where Noto Sans Arabic UI is used for sans-serif. Once it’s in the archive, people will be able to test more easily.
What about when I am using a German locale and want to have a better Arabic font overall without installing another language? For example, in Kubuntu 20.04 I was using a German local and did not install any other language, and the Arabic font in Facebook in Firefox was much better by default than in Ubuntu.
That’s a limitation with this solution. Hopefully, in the future, we can set it up in Ubuntu in a similar way that Kubuntu does today. But for now (Ubuntu 20.10 and possibly 20.04) we need to keep this requirement.
However, there are ways to work around it. Reminding again about this comment.
The project with improving Arabic rendering is not completed yet. We should fix it so an Arabic install of Ubuntu comes with the better fonts rendering by default, and the changes should also be backported to Ubuntu 20.04.
But before I go on with that, please let me know if you think that the current groovy configuration is good enough.
