Noto fonts screw my system, please stop forcing fonts upon me!

[Eike Hein]

On 12/18/2015 12:42 AM, Mark Gaiser wrote:
> I consider that to be one of the biggest issues in plasma.

It's a case-by-case thing. The actual installed size of Noto
depends a lot on how a distro choses to package it (split by
writing system vs big monolothic package). If a reasonable
subset of Noto's language coverage is installed it obviates
the need for a lot of other fonts that would previously be
installed by distros to achieve the same coverage, but
contain plenty of redundant glyphs. A distro can well make
the default install smaller by packaging and using Noto well,
and you can expect distros - independent of KDE's decision -
to come to this conclusion soon. It's a really useful font
package.


> If i report font issues, nobody is looking at them anyway. See [1] for
> oxygen.

That's disproven by the existence of this thread. The lack
of maintenance for Oxygen is something we actively tried to
solve, and when we couldn't, we addressed it by switching.

IOW people definitely looked at it and that's why we're here
now.


> Besides, this is a google font so i would have to report it against
> their bug tracker (github in this case i guess?). But what if the thing
> i want to report is not a bug at all? To mee, it just looks that way
> because it has too much line spacing. But the font just seems to be that
> way so the font itself is probably not the problem here. Just using it
> as desktop font is the problem and _that_ is where plasma comes in.

"It's not what I like" != "it's a bug". We offer
customization options for users to tailor the experience
to their individual preferences. Defaults do matter very
much, and I've made the case for why Noto is a good default
that improves the experience for many users. Those users
seem to have different needs from yours and you seem
overly focused on yours.

Users in a CJK country, with previous font setups, would
see stuff like a clash of visually incongruent type faces
within the same line if it mixed Latin and a CJK character
set, and varying line heights if a line contained only the
one or the other. This sort of mess is gone now. This does
address real bug reports you could have (probably still
can, tbh) find on BKO as well.

(This was also the case with Latin/Cyrillic and Latin/Arabic
mixes specifically on Oxygen, since Oxygen really only did
Latin. And that's before you get into newer needs like
emoji.)


> If THAT combination isn't tested by google, then perhaps that
> combination is not meant to used at all. 

Noto is the default sans-serif font family used on Google
Chrome OS, for chrissakes. It was basically *made for
Chrome*.


> I'm not going to send you a screenshot. Just install the font and run
> chromium. At first you will instantly notice the fonts looking weirdly
> different with more space around them. Then you start noticing layout
> breakage. Then you start wondering: "hmm, what screwed my system up this
> time".. two days later you will figure out it's a font installed by plasma.

I still don't see anything like this in Chrome here, FWIW.


Cheers,
Eike