We need better Arabic fonts

[khaled]

The current default Arabic font (PakType) is very ugly and unreadable that I think it should be removed. Other fonts doesn't fully cover Arabic script; KACST fonts only support Arabic and Nafees fonts only support Urdu. There is also no fixed width Arabic font.

In short I think we should get ride of paktype-fonts and kacst-fonts and replace them with a more readable with wider coverage Arabic fonts.

[khaled]

I've been working on a set of "core" Arabic fonts that has rough equivalents to serif, sans-serif and monospace fonts, and cover Arabic, Urdu, Pashto and Farsi languages. I'm preparing a fedora package for them.

[kimquirk]

Please try to get this in the next few days if possible.

[khaled]

spec file

[khaled]

This spec file has the sans-serif and monospace fonts, which are the most important ones, serif font might be ready shortly. Could some one with more fedora experience help upstreaming the package?

[mstone]

First, add an entry to the OLPC Package Wishlist and then send some mail to fedora-olpc-list@rh.c or https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list@rh.c. These actions will put you in touch with others who may be able to help. (You could also write directly to the Fedora maintainers of your favorite font packages since they are also likely to have the necessary expertise.)

[khaled]

Sorry, I'll be offline to the end of this week, if this is urgent, could some one package it for OLPC until we push it to fedora?

[gregorio]

Hi Khaled,

can you or someone else send an e-mail to fedora-olpc-list at redhat.com to get help packaging.

Need this in ASAP...

Thanks,

Greg S

[sayamindu]

I poked Subhodip on IRC to package the fonts, and he has put up a request for review at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=461139

Subhodip - could you ask the fedora-olpc list if someone can review the request ?

[khaled]

Great! I was going to check this, when I saw this comment.

[sayamindu]

As per the review, the font package had to be split into two. The second review request is at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=462711

[sayamindu]

The two fonts are packaged in my public_rpms (home/sayamindu/public_rpms/joyride). The filenames are:

Mothanna-fonts-0.02-3.olpc3.noarch.rpm Mothanna-fonts-0.02-3.olpc3.src.rpm

Thabit-fonts-0.02-3.fc9.noarch.rpm Thabit-fonts-0.02-3.fc9.src.rpm

Scott, please add them, to joyride.

[cscott]

I assume these will be upstreamed into fedora eventually?

The original requester asked that paktype-fonts and kacst-fonts be removed as well, is that correct?

[sayamindu]

Replying to cscott:

I assume these will be upstreamed into fedora eventually?

yes. The upstream requests for package review are https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=461139 and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=462711

The original requester asked that paktype-fonts and kacst-fonts be removed as well, is that correct?

Yes, I think it should be safe to remove those two fonts.

[sayamindu]

I just noticed that the fonts-arabic package needs to be removed as well. paktype and kacst are dependencies of this metapackage.

[cscott]

Change made to joyride; should be in joyride-2474 or later. Please test in joyride, and if arabic looks right, move the 'action needed' tag to 'approve for release' to get the change into the next stable release candidate.

[sayamindu]

I noticed two serious issues wrt numerals in these fonts

1. With the Mothanna font selected in Write, I get stars instead of digits 2. With the Thabit font selected, I get Latin digits (1,2,3,4,5..)

(2) happens in the mesh searchbar as well.

Khaled, is this intentional ? Moreover, I notice that in the Mothanna font (I opened it with a font-editor), there are a lot of star symbols (which look like place-holders to me).

Scott, I suggest that we keep the current fonts till Khaled replies on this. I'm not very familiar with Arabic, so I would prefer to remain conservative here, more so since we already ship Arabic fonts (though quite ugly).

[khaled]

Replying to sayamindu:

I noticed two serious issues wrt numerals in these fonts 1. With the Mothanna font selected in Write, I get stars instead of digits

The font doesn't contain any Latin characters or European digits, I think this is a bug in AbiWord's font substitution and fall back mechanism (among its other bugs)

2. With the Thabit font selected, I get Latin digits (1,2,3,4,5..)

Thabit includes Latin glyphs from IBM's courier font, but if you type Arabic digits (Indo-Arabic) you'll get them.

(2) happens in the mesh searchbar as well.

This isn't clear to me, olpc Arabic keyboard layout has Arabic digits, if you switched the layout you should get Arabic digits.

Khaled, is this intentional ? Moreover, I notice that in the Mothanna font (I opened it with a font-editor), there are a lot of star symbols (which look like place-holders to me).

They are place holders to convince some software (Qt4) that the font supports Arabic, if those glyphs were empty Qt4 won't use the Arabic part of the font, though (because of the way this font is designed) I don't need them. However, those stars shouldn't appear in the output, otherwise it is a bug in the application.

[sayamindu]

Hmm.. I tried again, and saw proper characters in Write again. Maybe this is the unpredictable behaviour shown by Write from time to time ? I'll start with a clean image from scratch and test again. If I get proper behaviour, I'll ask for a Approve for release.

[sayamindu]

| Test Case |

1. Edit /etc/sysconfig/keyboard to look like

KEYTABLE="us"
XKB_MODEL="olpc"
XKB_LAYOUT="us,ara"
XKB_VARIANT="olpc2,olpc"

2. From Sugar-Control Panel, select Arabic (Algeria)

3. Restart sugar

4. Verify the following

• There are only Latin and Arabic glyphs on the UI (no funny looking boxes, and no stars enclosed by circles)
• Typing of Arabic numerals works as per the layout at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Arabic_Keyboard
• Latin text, while being typed should not come up as ugly looking Italic Comic Sans like fonts
• The keyboard test mentioned above should be carried out in the Sugar mesh search bar and in Write with
  • The Mothanna font selected
  • The Thabit font selected

[sayamindu]

Just tested in a pristine installation of joyride-2483. Works fine except for some occurrence of #2207

Please approve for release.

[mstone]

Approved, thanks for the testcase!

[cscott]

Packages added to stable repository in commit afc4c3b2 for build 764. Please confirm the package versions are correct and test in stable build 764 or later.