New Default Console Font
Summary
A new console font, eurlatgr, was recently added to kbd and it should be better default console font for European based languages written in Latin or Greek script. eurlatgr is based on latarcyrheb-sun16 so the typeface does not change.
Owner
- Name: Marko Myllynen
- Email: myllynen@redhat.com
- Name: Mike FABIAN
- Email: mfabian@fedoraproject.org
- Release notes owner:
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 22
- Last updated: 2014-10-15
- Tracker bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1146002
Detailed Description
eurlatgr would bring these changes over the current default latarcyrheb-sun16:
- full compatibility with latarcyrheb-sun16 for Latin script and special characters
- Arabic/Cyrillic/Hebrew are not supported at all by eurlatgr so those users should still stay with latarcyrheb-sun16
- non-European languages written in Latin script (like Vietnamese) are not fully supported but perhaps a bit more so than with latarcyrheb-sun16
- the only non-Arabic/Cyrillic/Hebrew characters not present in eurlatgr but in latarcyrheb-sun16 are U+F800 and U+F804 which are not valid Unicode characters so the use case for them is unclear, especially today. These could be re-added if there's a real need for them but if not, dropping them is ok
- full support for all European languages written in Latin script
- full support for Greek
- full support for a huge list of characters and character sets (see Documentation below)
- support for a wide range of accented Latin characters not present in latarcyrheb-sun16 to allow people to write their names correctly
- support for glyphs used by some systemd(1) utilities
- support for glyphs used by man(1) (see e.g. the bottom of unicode(7) how some characters are not displayed properly under latarcyrheb-sun16)
- support for glyphs that have become popular recently, like the smiley (☺) and arrows (e.g. →)
Benefit to Fedora
More complete default console font for Fedora users with full backwards compatibility.
Scope
- Proposal owners:
Adjust langtable rules to prefer eurlatgr instead of latarcyrheb-sun16 for the languages supported by eurlatgr.
Review additional related tools (anaconda, dracut, systemd) to see whether any defaults need to be changed.
- Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
- Release engineering: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
- Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
Upgrade/compatibility impact
Everything should continue to work as normal after upgrade.
How To Test
- Switch to console
- Use setfont(8) to set console font to latarcyrheb-sun16 or eurlatgr
- Display for example /usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts/README.eurlatgr to see the difference (but note that some tools like less(1) and nano(8) do not support all the characters listed there. vi(1) or emacs(1) do).
User Experience
Less replacement characters (�) displayed on console when encountering texts using non-ASCII characters.
Dependencies
kbd-2.0.2 or newer, already available on Fedora 21.
Contingency Plan
- Contingency mechanism: Revert any changes made
- Contingency deadline: Beta
- Blocks release? No
Documentation
Release Notes
N/A