Comment 26 for bug 502610

(In reply to comment #6)
> I like the general direction this bug is heading. Quick comments:
>
> - Time to put CJK stuff in its own file?

that seems to be fine, something like 65-cjk.conf

>
> - Helps immensely if you also tag each font in the comments whether it has
> Latin / Arabic / any non-CJK glyphs or not.

almost all of them have Latin (basic), but rarely have Arabic. I will add more
comment when I get chance this weekend.

> - I think non-free fonts should have higher priority than free fonts. If a
> user installs non-free fonts, chances are they want to use it. For all other
> users though, it's a non-issue since they only have free fonts so the order
> doesn't matter.

As I said, I personally haven't heard any official licenses given from these
font makers to use their fonts on a Linux desktop. If anyone install and use
these fonts, it is very likely illegal. In another word, putting them in the
conf files simply makes unlicensed use of commercial fonts easier, and of
course, OSS font development projects will potentially lose users and feedback.

In the long-run, Linux desktop needs more high-quality CJK fonts, and these
fonts are less likely come from the commercial font makers, but the active OSS
font projects. So, helping the commercial font makers to promote their fonts in
the OSS community will eventually hurt linux desktop (by binding more and more
users to the proprietary fonts).

Plus, the current OSS CJK fonts are really on-par in quality with the
commercial ones: WenQuanYi's bitmaps are of similar quality to commercial
bitmaps, and more complete; "Droid Sans Fallback" from Google is really a
professionally developed font bought from some Chinese company. WenQuanYi Zen
Hei also performs very well on Linux desktop and progresses everyday with users
feedback. As we now have plenty of choices with OSS fonts, I don't think making
the commercial fonts use out-of-box will buy us any benefit.

If CJK needs to give default support for commercial fonts, there are tons of
commercial Latin fonts (like Arial, Helvetica ...) in the market, should we
also pre-configue fontconfig for them as well...?