Desktop/Whiteboards/BetterFontHandling

We spend most of our computer time reading and writing text. Studies show that even the smallest improvement in fonts or font rendering produces huge benefits. The competition has realised it a long time ago.

Possible areas for improvement in font handling:

• Modernize/complete the font selection/preview dialog. See:
  • Nicolas Spalinger's call
  • another gtk-devel thread
  • Support user control or OpenType features gnome545510, gnome547472
  • Fix it in OOo too: ooo79878
• Modernize the font tab in the appearance capplet
• Font installation:
  • Make font installation easy. Packages may not be the best approach to fonts (packaging means minimal legal audit of the font, addition of human-friendly description and necessary fontconfig rules, bundling of license text, fc-cache automation, etc Doing it all elsewhere means creating another font-specific packaging format.)
  • If packages are the answer for now, at least make font installation automatic, see Features/AutomaticFontInstallation,
    • Enhance Firefox too moz467729,
    • Do the same for OOo ooo96826
• Font preview:
  • write a font preview generator
  • use it to add a preview of font packages to the PK GUI frontends fdo18928
• Fix OOo:
  • Support CFF fonts ooo43029
  • Support OpenType features in TTF and CFF fonts ooo16032,ooo78749
  • Fix the font selection (see before)
  • Add font auto-installation support (see before)
• Fix Firefox:
  • make it honour desktop font settings moz414427, moz412669
  • support font-stretch moz3512
  • Add font auto-installation support (see before)
• Add baseline table support to pango (align scripts in a line of text) for non-latin scripts gnome346419
• Implement side bearing deltas in cairo and pango (see http://osdir.com/ml/fonts.freetype.user/2007-03/msg00057.html)
• Improve freetype rasterization link1, link2?

• Fix the following problems:

Tagging problems
Problems are tagged by CC-ing the SIG bugs list when the upstream issue tracker allows it (any bugzilla) or by CC-ing a specific user (fedorafonts) otherwise.

Issue tracker	Description	Issues	Tagging method and other comments
bugzilla.redhat.com	Fedora package grouping (comps), specific Fedora code changes	Problem list	CC the bugs list
bugzilla.freedesktop.org	Fontconfig, HarfBuzz, DejaVu, Freetype…	Problem list
bugzilla.gnome.org	Pango	Problem list
bugs.kde.org	KDE (Konqueror…)	Problem list
bugzilla.mozilla.org	Firefox, Thunderbird…	Problem list
bugs.webkit.org	Webkit	Problem list