Monday, June 10, 2013

Fedora shows Tofu (Square Box/Dabba) for following Unicode scripts

Was just going through GUCharmap to check how many scripts are still not covered with the default fonts installation of Fedora. Still number of fonts required to remove Square-Box/Tofu/डब्बा/ and provide at least single font for each script of Unicode. Though i think NBMP ( non basic multilingual plane script) is not high priority target first but at least other script on BMP which are in active use must be supported.

Thought it will take long time.

Below is the list from GUCharmap showing for scripts represented as  Tofu/SquareBox :)

Missing fonts in fedora

- Avestan
- Balinese
- Bamum
- Batak
- Brahmi
- Buhid
- Carian
- Chakma  - NBMP
- Cham
- Cuneiform
- Cypriot - NBMP
- Deseret - NBMP (supported by noto)
- Egyptian Heiroglyphs - NBMP
- Imperial Aramaic - NBMP
- Inscriptional Pahlavi - NBMP
- Inscriptional Parthian - NBMP
- Javanese
- Kaithi - NBMP
- Kharoshthi - NBMP
- Limbu - NBMP
- Lisu
- Lycian - NBMP
- Lydian - NBMP
- Mandaic - NBMP
- Meroitic Cursive - NMBP
- Meroitic Hieroglyphs - NBMP
- Miao - NBMP
- Mangolian
- New Tai Lue
- Ol Chiki
- Old South Arabian - NBMP
- Old Turkic - NBMP
- Phags Pa - NBMP
- Rejang
- Samaritan
- Saurashtra
- Sharda - NBMP
- Shavin - NBMP
- Sora Sompeng - NBMP
- Sundanese
- Syloti  Nagri
- Tagalog
- Tagbanwa
- Tai Tham
- Tai Viet
- Takri - NBMP

While comparing this with Google's noto fonts, they have provided fonts for some of the scripts in the above list. Will add those to Fedora soon.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Go go go!

Thanks a lot for caring about this.

John said...

A few of these are already in Fedora.

gdouros-aegean-fonts - Carian
gdouros-akkadian-fonts - Cuneiform
gdouros-aegean-fonts - Cypriot
gdouros-analecta-fonts - Deseret
gdouros-aegyptus-fonts - Egyptian Hieroglyphs
gdouros-aegean-fonts- Lycian
gdouros-aegean-fonts- Lydian
almas-mongolian-title-fonts - Mongolian (Partial)

Meroitic is found in the upstream version of gdouros-aegyptus-fonts, but I don't know if that's in process or not.

The Culmus project has an Ancient Semitic Scripts package that has Imperial Aramaic and Samaritan coverage, and some of their other fonts are already packaged in Fedora.

Every time I look at the Fedora Fonts SIG wishlist and see a font there for four years I've been wanting to be packaged, I feel quite guilty for not trying to learn how to package anything, actually contributing to instead of just using Fedora.

-John.

Pravin Satpute said...

@john,

Thanks for sharing this. I think i missed this since i was only looking at fonts installed with default installation.

Presently this situation is much improved, i will write new blog soon.