Hi again!
Once upon a time, DejaVu font was used for all Persian text rendering in
Fedora. While some people considered it to be somewhat ugly,
it was consistent. But, it changed a few releases ago where "Droid Kufi"
(from google-droid-sans-fonts) started to be used in some
places, e.g. in Telegram desktop (from rpmfusion) or IIRC in some other
apps like Thunderbird. "Droid Kufi" is not suitable for Persian,
it can be considered a fantasy font in Persian not something to be used
in normal Sans text.
Then, in Fedora 36, with the introduction of Noto fonts by default,
things become worse: now, we have still DejaVu fonts being used
by default in Gnome, Droid Kufi still is being used but in less places
(when Droid Sans or Open Sans are needed), and Noto Sans Arabic
is also being used in some places (e.g. Thunderbird & Firefox default
font for title bars and menus and....).
To make things even worse, from what I see in [1] and [2], it is
expected that "PakType Naskh Basic" be used as the default Persian
font; which fortunately isn't the case. PakType fonts are absolutely not
suitable for Persian normal text, at least for fa_IR locale.
Noto Sans Arabic can be an acceptable font for Persian, specially if
this bug [3] is fixed. It can be also considered a good font to be
used where "Droid Sans" is needed for Persian text; as it seems that
Noto fonts are similar to Droid ones. Noto Naskh Arabic could
be also a good candidate, and it is very similar or exactly the same as
the font used by Android for Persian; but it has two issues:
1. It is considered a Serif font, so I wonder if it is acceptable to be
used also where a Sans font is needed
2. It appears somewhat smaller than other fonts, which is somewhat
annoying. I wonder why, but comparing to fonts like
Noto Sans, Droid Sans and even Droid Naskh, it is smaller. If it was
almost as big as the other options, it'd be probably a good
candidate to be used by default too.
How this consistency issue can be fixed? I'm trying to package Vazirmatn
(formerly Vazir) font for Fedora, which seems to be a
good candidate to be used by default in Fedora. But, I don't know how to
solve the consistency problem. I am able to make it
to be used by default by Gnome, and also be used where Open Sans is
needed (currently for Telegram Desktop mainly); but I
cannot make it to work by default by Firefox/Thunderbird. They are
weird, while they show "Default (Vazirmatn)" (or "sans-serif")
option; when you select it, it falls back to "Noto Sans Arabic" font,
but if I select "Vazirmatn" explicitly, it uses it. I wonder if I
should fill a bug against Firefox/Thunderbird.
Now:
1. How can we select a font to be used consistently everywhere for Persian?
2. Which option should be "the one"? DejaVu Sans, Noto Sans Arabic (with
that annoying bug fixed), Noto Naskh (scaled up),
or to be added "Vazirmatn" font? I'm leaned towards Vazirmatn for now
considering the current state of all these fonts; but
I wonder if one of Noto ones are preferred for distro consistency, but
changes are needed for them.
[1] https://tagoh.fedorapeople.org/fonts/noto/f36-noto.html
[2] https://tagoh.fedorapeople.org/fonts/status/36.html
[3] https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts/issues/2251
[4] https://github.com/rastikerdar/vazirmatn
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