Subpackaging the Noto CJK fonts

[Jens-Ulrik Petersen <petersen@xxxxxxxxxx>]

For Fedora 28 we have Changes to make Google Noto CJK fonts the default for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. This provides a number of advantages include new Serif faces, and Mono fonts for terminals etc.

However it comes at a cost: there are 7 weights for each of the Sans and Serif fonts for each of the four languages.  Additionally the Mono fonts are only available in very large CJK coverage versions.

See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1562315

and https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/46 for size details.

We would like to propose an exception for google-noto-cjk-fonts for Fedora 28 where we will subpackage the extra weight variants to save a lot of space on the Live images and other media.

This will reduce Live images by about 250MB or more by only shipping the Regular and Bold weights, or even more if we only shipped Regular. Otherwise we will see a big impact on iso sizes across the distro which could aversely affect the release.

For Fedora 29 we plan to move to the more compact OpenType Collection version of the fonts which will provide a considerable saving, but it seems too late to make a such a big change now for F28.

Since East Asian fonts are so large, I think it makes sense to have a packaging exception for CJK fonts to allow the subpackaging of weight variants: it could be done with metapackages to make it more obvious (we could even do one package per weight and have a meta package that pulls them all in, if that makes it more clear and discoverable).

Jens

_______________________________________________
fonts mailing list -- fonts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe send an email to fonts-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx