Talk:Features/AutomaticFontInstallation

This is an interesting cool idea indeed. My initial reaction was do we really need it now, given that we install mostly fonts now by default in Fedora anyway? I think I would rather just install good coverage by default (as we pretty much do already) than require users to download fonts, but for people who don't want all good font coverage by default or on small machines or trying to read an "obscure" script it probably makes sense. Do you have any explicit examples in mind that would help many users of current default Fedora installs? --Petersen 00:16, 20 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I can think of some use cases. While I agree that its good to have good coverage by default here are some instances where we won't cut it.
 * New characters are added to Unicode, our current full coverage fonts don't handle it but all of our tools can. Would be nice for instance that when N'ko was added to Unicode we would simply be able to pull the correct font in if we needed it.
 * Small devices are you mention that want to focus on the needs of the user in South Africa I don't need Japanese, Korean, Sinhala fonts. But I do need ḓṱḽṋṅ which are more likely to be missing then Japanese fonts that I'll never use except to make pages at least look OK.
 * Long term support. Think RHEL it makes sense that we are able to pull new fonts onto a user computer even 5 years after the fact.
 * Good font choice. While coverage is great (and I'm not sure this solution is directly addressing this point) it would be nice if a document needs a certain style of fonts that we are able to pull that in instead of using a font with coverage but different style.
 * Full coverage revisted Do we really want to install music fonts and all the essoteric glyphs possible? (Numbers in circles, wingdings, full width vs normal width, etc, etc. But someone might want them sometime and it seems that now we can handle that.
 * --Dwayne 05:51, 28 January 2009 (UTC)