3 ms·

I'd just like to ping a thanks for the effort you put in. Libreoffice is pretty popular in India as a teaching tool. Just wanted to draw your attention to two

I'd just like to ping a thanks for the effort you put in. Libreoffice is pretty popular in India as a teaching tool. Just wanted to draw your attention to two points: Libre is impossible to pronounce in Asia. Which is why people are not able to Google for you (how do I tell my friend to Google for X). It would be great if you could take Google Noto fonts into account. There are several vernacular language users in India who would love to switch over to Linux. Emoji ! In fact, its not a bad idea at all to consider LibreOffice to have an independent font installer (like the way Atom editor does plugins)

SSLy 11y ago
The best thing imho would be having distros include the noto fonts by default.
chris_wot 11y ago
The work I do is tiny compared to the other developers :-) I'm really getting more out of contributing to the LibreOffice code base than The Documentation Foundation gets from me! But thank you, it's always great to hear that someone appreciates our efforts. It's interesting to hear that LibreOffice is being used in Indian education - in my opinion Indic scripts are by far the most advanced and complex writing system, even more so than Arabic and East-Asian scripts! In terms of fonts, we use Graphite, Pango and Harfbuzz in an attempt to wrangle out font handling. We've got some serious text layout issues (look for the comments in the code around DXArray!) but the basic guts are there. It's a complex issue and you can see how over 30 years there has been many, many stabs at getting international fonts and text handling right. I think I have so far counted 10 classes that just handle fonts... And have recently removed one (FontInfo) that didn't seem to actually do anything! So refactoring such an old module in the project might take some time, and also bare in mind I'm (sadly) a monolinguist so mainly at the moment I'm trying to streamline class hierarchies, get some saner class interfaces, merge classes where appropriate, review the font mapping code and try to understand how we deal with three very different approaches to font and text handling on OS X, Windows and the rest of the Unix world... In terms of Noto, I think it would be unwise of us to bundle a font installer. It's not a bad idea, but LibreOffice UI code is currently tightly coupled to Star's VCL which was at one point a cross platform visual component library that could stand on its own: that has now gone by the wayside and the LibreOffice team is currently trying to wrangle it into a more stable and responsive framework. But it's quite hard to make another program out of it (sadly). Another reason is that the distributions are actually better off bundling the fonts themselves via their package management systems, and for Windows and OS X I really think I'd suggest embedding the fonts you want to use in the document themselves if that's the concern. As for the name: unfortunately that won't change now. Blame that on Oracle, who decided not to give the TDF the trademark and instead gave it to Apache, where the code is currently bitrotting away :-(

SSLy 11y ago

The best thing imho would be having distros include the noto fonts by default.

chris_wot 11y ago

The work I do is tiny compared to the other developers :-) I'm really getting more out of contributing to the LibreOffice code base than The Documentation Foundation gets from me! But thank you, it's always great to hear that someone appreciates our efforts. It's interesting to hear that LibreOffice is being used in Indian education - in my opinion Indic scripts are by far the most advanced and complex writing system, even more so than Arabic and East-Asian scripts! In terms of fonts, we use Graphite, Pango and Harfbuzz in an attempt to wrangle out font handling. We've got some serious text layout issues (look for the comments in the code around DXArray!) but the basic guts are there. It's a complex issue and you can see how over 30 years there has been many, many stabs at getting international fonts and text handling right. I think I have so far counted 10 classes that just handle fonts... And have recently removed one (FontInfo) that didn't seem to actually do anything! So refactoring such an old module in the project might take some time, and also bare in mind I'm (sadly) a monolinguist so mainly at the moment I'm trying to streamline class hierarchies, get some saner class interfaces, merge classes where appropriate, review the font mapping code and try to understand how we deal with three very different approaches to font and text handling on OS X, Windows and the rest of the Unix world... In terms of Noto, I think it would be unwise of us to bundle a font installer. It's not a bad idea, but LibreOffice UI code is currently tightly coupled to Star's VCL which was at one point a cross platform visual component library that could stand on its own: that has now gone by the wayside and the LibreOffice team is currently trying to wrangle it into a more stable and responsive framework. But it's quite hard to make another program out of it (sadly). Another reason is that the distributions are actually better off bundling the fonts themselves via their package management systems, and for Windows and OS X I really think I'd suggest embedding the fonts you want to use in the document themselves if that's the concern. As for the name: unfortunately that won't change now. Blame that on Oracle, who decided not to give the TDF the trademark and instead gave it to Apache, where the code is currently bitrotting away :-(