So open fonts for the web are nicely coming together... But what about the desktop side of things?
Well, recent versions of packagekit and pango have introduced a new mechanism for automatic font detection and installation for the desktop. Basically when faced with text containing characters not covered by a font already installed on the system a little dialog will pop up prompting you to install an extra package containing a font covering that character. Pretty nifty.
To try this out:
- install Fedora rawhide somewhere
- install some extra packages:
sudo yum install gnome-packagekit-extra packagekit-gtk-module - activate the gconf key:
gconftool-2 –type boolean -s /apps/gnome-packagekit/enable_font_helper 1
Fedora already comes with a good selection of open fonts by default thanks to the good work of the Fedora Font SIG, but try opening the HELLO.txt file in gedit, or copying elements that look foreign to you from the Why can't they all speak **** and you should see the dialog telling you that you need an extra font to support a particular language, asking you to search for a suitable font, offering you a selection of packages before allowing you to install it.
It's a great start so a big thank you to Richard Hughes and Behdad Esfahbod and all the other people involved for their work on this!
For future versions I think the UI should really show more information about the packaged font itself so that the user can make a more educated choice: font family name, foundry, designer, license, along with some classification categories while making some of that metadata clickable.