https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1809989
Bug ID: 1809989 Summary: By default install Noto fonts for Unicode scripts not already covered by default Product: Fedora Version: 31 Status: NEW Component: google-noto-fonts Assignee: petersen@redhat.com Reporter: hsivonen@hsivonen.fi QA Contact: extras-qa@fedoraproject.org CC: fonts-bugs@lists.fedoraproject.org, i18n-bugs@lists.fedoraproject.org, petersen@redhat.com, psatpute@redhat.com, pwu@redhat.com, tagoh@redhat.com Target Milestone: --- Classification: Fedora
There is currently movement towards protecting browser users from font fingerprinting. This means refusing, by default, to load user-installed fonts, which makes the set of fonts that each OS installs by default even more important than before.
Firefox bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1582687
W3C CSS WG issue: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4497
Currently, Windows 10, macOS, Android, and Chrome OS provide broader installed-by-default Unicode coverage than Fedora.
Examples of living scripts that have enough active users to make it to the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_writing_systems#List_of_writing_script... but are not supported by default in Fedora 31 include Javanese, Sundanese, Batak, Balinese, Mongolian, and New Tai Lue.
Egyptian hieroglyphs is an example of a dead script the Fedora 31 doesn't support out of the box but Windows 10, macOS, Chrome OS, and Android do.
To remedy this with minimal disk space impact, I suggest the same approach that Apple took. Apple bundles with macOS those Noto fonts that cover scripts that were not already covered by the previous installed-by-default set of fonts on macOS. In the macOS case, the on-disk footprint of the Noto fonts that were required to take macOS to Android/Chrome OS-competitive Unicode coverage was only a couple of megabytes. (The fonts are hidden in /Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts/Language Support/.) In the case of Fedora, the set of Noto fonts required to reach the Chrome OS / Android level of script coverage is a bit larger than in the macOS case but should still be manageable.
Please install, by default, those Noto fonts that provide support for scripts that are not properly supported by the fonts that Fedora already installs by default.