Redundant fontconfig files

If we can compensate such thing in another file there is no reason why we cannot remove the ubuntu-specific 65-fonts-arphic*.conf, but as said in Bug #1468027 I don't want to hurt Chinese appearance in favor of Japanese or other languages.

Well, assuming that they are really not needed, my idea was to drop them, not to move them to some other package.

But this is not in a hurry. Let's focus on bug #1468027 now.

Maybe you can make the bindings locale-specific with something like <test name="lang">?

Regarding the current config, regardless of if the files are being dropped, I have to say that UKai shouldn't really be in one of sans, serif or mono -- Kai is more like 'cursive' (not 'Comic Sans' -- think of script typefaces like Zapfino or Brush Script.) Such mismatch is partially what causes bug #502610 to look that significant.

PS: Personally I often find some Chinese Serifs like SimSun and UMing too thin to match the weights of western serif fonts. The LaTeX community seem to do this better with serif fonts from cwTeX and Fandol. Perhaps Ubuntu can consider using these too? (Be advised, these fonts are not hinted -- they only care about printing...)

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

On 2016-04-08 15:34, Mingye Wang wrote:
> Maybe you can make the bindings locale-specific with something like
> <test name="lang">?

Well, we already have locale specific bindings in
69-language-selector-zh-??.conf. 65-fonts-takao-*.conf are for e.g. an
English locale. And the existence of the latter is maybe the only
reason why we also need 64-language-selector-prefer.conf.

After having fiddled with fontconfig configuration lately, and
especially if the default font for Japanese and Korean is changed to
Noto Sans CJK, I begin to feel that it would be achievable to get rid
of the 69-language-selector-zh-??.conf files. What I think is needed is
to consider the configuration of all the CJK languages carefully, and
to do so in the beginning of a development cycle.

Considering the outcome of bug #1581151, I rest my case as regards this bug report too. Given that we now have 64-language-selector-prefer.conf, it would be possible to move the UKai/UMing stuff to that file, and with that get back in sync with Debian. OTOH, the packages are not updated very often... Wouldn't be worth the effort.

(I'm going to keep 64-language-selector-prefer.conf in the language-selector package for now instead of moving it into fonts-noto-cjk. Since we seem to keep needing Ubuntu specific font configuration for CJK, it's more convenient to have it in l-s IMO.)

Just FYI, a user (GPG D0556253) complained about "installing complete Chinese support in 14.04 causes uming and ukai to be default fonts" in an informal chat that I was just participating in.

Unfortunately I don't have the condition to reproduce the bug, and additionally he mentioned that the bug happens "2/3 of the time" which sounds very strange to me. Anyway I am posting this here since the bug sounds like the cause and I am not opening a bug for something that I am very unsure about.