[G-I] Indic and arabic fonts; which are best?

[Eddy PetriÅŸor <eddy dot petrisor at gmail dot com>]

Hello,

The Debian Installer team is working on a graphical installer which we
will support arabic and indic scripts. For this we need to know if the
curent chosen fonts are ok, if they render correctly, and similar
stuff.

Currently we have made a few snapshots[1] with the default fonts which
are now in the installer.
Please tell us if any of the fonts in question look bad or are broken.


As far as we know, the situation is the following:
- we use Mukti narrow for Bengali [2]* and they should be ok
([3],[4],[5]), but  apparently freefont is not stripped properly, so
it breaks the display.
- (Nepali it was not included in the build I used); see
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstallerGUIFonts for status.
- nazli is not used for farsi, but it should be [6] (font should be bigger)
- arabic is fine with ae_AlMohanad, as it is now [7] (font should be
bigger; nazli could be used, but it appears that they are not that
great)


We would appreciate if you could help us to check which font is better
for each llanguage, taking into account the images at [9]

Note that we know that arabic is RTL, but that is fixed in the
experimental images, so please ignore that for now.


*snapshots deprecated by [9]

[1] http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/gtk-frontend/font-snapshots/unstable-060121
[2] http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/gtk-frontend/font-snapshots/unstable-060121/bengali/
[3] http://www.webalice.it/zinosat/shots/bn_mukti1.jpg
[4] http://www.webalice.it/zinosat/shots/bn_mukti2.jpg
[5] http://www.webalice.it/zinosat/shots/bn_mukti3.jpg
[6] http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/gtk-frontend/font-snapshots/unstable-060121/persian/
[7] http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/gtk-frontend/font-snapshots/unstable-060121/arabic/
[8] http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/gtk-frontend/font-snapshots/ttf-nazli-060121/arabic/
[9] http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/gtk-frontend/font-snapshots/unstable-060121-single-fonts/

--
Regards,
EddyP
=============================================
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" A.Einstein