Sorry I am late, I wasn’t able to free myself during the week.
I have to emphasize that the way of changing the font family should take a larger group of users, and much more extended discussion than what’s going on here. This is part of a good QA and shouldn’t be left just for random Internet strangers like us to decide, otherwise it could be an attack point for anybody (E.g a horrible person comes and changes the font for millions of users to an unreadable font just because he saw that he could post few replies on an Internet forum). Ubuntu is powered by a multi-million dollar company and I am sure you could’ve at least posted the link of this post on your social media before you push changes.
I mean no offense, but changing the the font family is a huge design change that shouldn’t be left to “we don’t have resources”. It doesn’t take resources to post something on mailing lists or social media, or at least wait for 2-3 months of extended discussion rather than deciding on a new font family in a matter of one week. If you don’t have resources then at least make announcement for the interested groups and we can bring people to a poll using our own resources.
please note that the change was uploaded to groovy on August 16. We didn’t receive a single complaint from Arabic speaking users, so a little over three weeks later the change was made in 20.04.
Sorry but I am pretty sure that no Arabic-speaking users (outside of the replies here) knew of the existence of this forum nor of this discussion. You can’t expect users to simply monitor your internal forums and immediately give feedback in matter of 3 weeks. I would expect at least 3 months long discussions for such change.
May I humbly suggest that we focus on trying to address those issues.
Those are Google fonts and I am not sure anyone is ready to spend months trying to contact them with uncertainty that they fix it. I think a better option would be to switch to another font rather than shipping a broken font for users.
I need to test the fonts mentioned here so that I can give feedback regarding to the bugs I mentioned. I think I can make it on this day or maybe tomorrow, but I don’t understand why are we in such a hurry to push changes in such short times?
But in fact, compiling the latest source code from there and also trying the pre-compiled versions from Google’s site gives the same bug. So the bug is still here. I just sent a reply there.
I couldn’t find anyone who reported the whitespace issues I mentioned, hence it would probably take them a couple of months to fix that even if we reported it here. There are numerous other bugs reported in the fonts for Arabic: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts/labels/Script-Arabic
I like the Noto Sans Arabic font (Not the UI version), it gives a better relaxed feeling to long texts and is quite good even for the Interface. But it also suffers from the 2 bugs (Whitespaces issue and the broken diacritics).
However, I must also note that I found a huge difference in the version from the GitHub of Noto fonts and the Ubuntu’s packaged version, it even feels like a different font:
Go back to the old default Dejavu font, not recommended.
Use the Noto Sans Arabic font instead of Noto Sans Arabic UI, and hope the two issues won’t cause a great deal for other users. We still need to investigate why there’s a huge difference in the font style of the Ubuntu’s packaged version and Git version (Perhaps a styling issue? My side?).
Use KacstOne font, which is in the fonts-kacst package in Ubuntu (It doesn’t suffer from any bug I mentioned):
Standard font for a large number of users (which is what I am doing and requesting; A poll, unlike your original post where you just say “Hey I like this ship it”), and where your feedback and use cases alone are not the deciding factor.
The fonts-noto-* packages are from Debian, and there is a time lag compared to the latest .ttf files at GitHub. The Debian packages were last updated in March 2020. It may explain the difference you noticed.
As I’ve said before, open counters are key to readability. That is why sans-serifs are used in UIs instead of serif designs. Naskh is akin to serif. It’s a mistake to use it for UIs. The Ubuntu fonts use a Kufic design that is more readable in small screens.
You have made your point about the process. It would be good if you could stop complaining about that now. @xlmnxp did nothing wrong. He called our attention to limitations with the previous default font for Arabic and proposed a new one. A few other affected users joined the discussion, and at some point I decided to upload a new configuration. That’s how changes to Ubuntu may happen, whether it is about fonts or other things.
We appreciate that you have joined the discussion. You are now an additional voice worth listening to.
Since I don’t speak Arabic, I have no own opinion about the best choice. Currently, for sans-serif, we have:
Noto Sans Arabic UI in Ubuntu 20.04
Noto Naskh Arabic UI in groovy (to become Ubuntu 20.10)
I will await more input before doing anything else.
Hello.
I have Ubuntu 20.04 with Arabic already installed. However I can’t seem to make the fonts change here. I tried to install/reinstall Arabic again to get that prompt that lets me install the new fonts. How do I get to do that ?
A poll wouldn’t magically wipe out possible variations in preferences among the Arabic speaking users. Personally I think that a nuanced discussion is a better basis of decision in most cases, and I hope for more input in this topic. So no, I’m not willing to spend time on making a poll.
With that said, and if some affected user would arrange with a poll, I would of course take the result into consideration when deciding about the default Arabic font for sans-serif.
My only input is that I would really prefer one of the Noto fonts. The reason is that I have a vague plan to give Noto fonts the highest fontconfig precedence for many scripts including latin. Doing so would make it
easier to set default font on a script by script basis,
possible to set default fonts for a script irrespective of the system locale (Please remember that the latter is not the case with the current solution for Arabic, which only works under an Arabic locale.), and
easier for a user to configure a customized font.
So with that I want to say that even if we are talking about the Arabic font at the moment, the route taken is still not a pure Arabic matter. The font configuration of Ubuntu as a whole needs to be taken into consideration.
A poll would guarantee a representative sample for responses among Arabic users. I could invite few hundreds to participate in a poll from my side, but not to register in a forum and write replies and get in long discussions.
I have like 5-10 issues in the current Noto Arabic Naskh font in various places (Web, interface, apps…), and as the other user says, it is absolutely not for user interfaces usage.
So with that on the table and with the “vague plan” I do not know to where we start from here.
Hi @gunnarhj
After some testing, I’m happy to report that the results are excellent out of the box, under groovy. I did nothing but select an Arabic locale during the installation, making it the best default Arabic experience under any Linux distro I experienced (many!).
I have like 5-10 issues in the current Noto Arabic Naskh font in various places (Web, interface, apps…), and as the other user says, it is absolutely not for user interfaces usage.
This worries me, did you test on plain installation? As I didn’t bump into any, except for a minor issue with a single character on the welcome dialog.
fito and mhsabbagh: What other font are you proposing instead? Here we are talking about a font used by default on the most widely used OS on the world, Android!
@mhsabbagh That font you’ve shown (off Github) looks really nice, however it has issues rendering certain words with diacritics, I wish that wasn’t the case, as it’s really good (clearer on UI elements?) and has more font weighs than regular/bold, but it’s broken so basically it’s not an option.
I’ll be around for further discussion or testing if required, thank you all for making Arabic more accessible on Ubuntu.
That sounds promising, thanks. Did you also check gnome-terminal? Asking because the latest thing I did in groovy was to explicitly state DejaVu as the font for monospace.
As an experiment I edited /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-ar.conf and replaced the three occurrences of binding="strong" with binding="same". That made a difference:
Can you please edit your /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-ar.conf file the same way, and let us know if you notice a difference in gnome-terminal.
And, if you do, please also confirm that sans-serif rendering still looks good.
