Re: [libreoffice-users] Font versus Character Substitution

Are you using the language block at the bottom of Writer to change 
language when writing a new paragraph in a different language?

It should be displaying your default language until you change it.

Hope this helps.

On 3/23/2015 1:38 PM, CVAlkan wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I’ve been fighting with multiple language documents in LibreOffice for some
> time, and am determined to understand what’s going on. To that end I have a
> few questions and some thoughts. My intent is either to have someone point
> out that I’m doing it all wrong, or to star some sort of conversation about
> how to improve things. So here goes …
>
> According to the Document Foundation Wiki’s Localization Guide for
> LibreOffice, versions of LibreOffice (and I’m particularly concerned with
> Writer here) running on Unix/Linux rely on the fontconfig utility to suggest
> a font replacement when a requested font is not available. Apparently
> LibreOffice uses its own routines under Windows.
>
> First Question: Is this still true in current versions?
>
> According to the documentation (man pages and such) for FontConfig, that
> utility matches fonts using a very specific set of font characteristics that
> are weighted in the following order: foundry, charset, family, lang, etc.
> With the advent of “free” fonts over the past decade, I’ve found that many –
> even most – such fonts have no foundry listed. Since that is the most
> heavily weighted attribute in the matching process, and since null is never
> equal to null, the matches returned are sometimes inappropriate.
>
> Second Question: Is FontConfig called by LibreOffice only when a complete
> font is missing, or if the font in question just doesn’t have some
> particular character(s)?
>
> This is particularly of interest with fonts having Complex Text Layouts.
> Although it is possible to set a CTL replacement for fonts in Writer (e.g.
> Tools | Options | LibreOffice Writer | Basic Fonts (CTL), Format | Character
> and so forth), this is always limited to a single font, which isn’t always
> realistic.
>
> As an example, let’s say we go to Tools | Options | Language Settings |
> Languages, check off “Complex Text Layout” and specify the language as Thai
> (again, this can only be done for one language at a time). If we use a font
> such as FreeSerif that has all the characters needed for both English and
> Thai (as well as most other languages you’re likely to run across),
> everything works just fine.
>
> On the other hand, if we use a free Google font such as Droid Sans (which
> has no foundry property), we get into trouble. Apparently in order to keep
> fonts to a reasonable size, Google offers additional unicode pages as
> separate font files: Droid Sans Armenian, Droid Sans Ethiopic, Droid Sans
> Thai, etc. If the current font is Droid Sans and some Thai characters are
> typed, fontconfig does NOT return Droid Sans Thai, but rather (seems to)
> return the first font in which it locates the requested language.
>
> Of course, this can be corrected for ONE font with Tools | Options |
> LibreOffice Writer | Basic Fonts (CTL), but if more than one font is used
> and neither is a so-called “pan-unicode” font, you must go through some
> annoying machinations to get things working correctly (this can be done with
> character styles, of course, but that can’t be considered anything other
> than a work-around). Character styles were really not meant for this –
> that’s what selecting a font is supposed to do.
>
> All of this tends to make creation of bi-lingual documents, particularly
> those using CTL, less flexible than  normal single language document
> creation – sprinkling a document with multiple documents is of course
> generally considered a bit tacky, but there are legitimate reasons for doing
> so. Creation of documents that use more than one language (and yes, I’ve
> done that) is even more tedious; if more than one CTL language is used (e.g.
> mixing Arabic and Hebrew, or Thai and Arabic) it’s a very difficult, if not
> impossible task. Could this perhaps be the real underlying reason a
> middle-east peace agreement can’t be reached? Is it just because there’s no
> way to write it down. (Sorry – I know this isn’t the place for politics, but
> the problem seems real enough to mention).
>
> Even officially sanctioned free fonts can be problematic. The government of
> Thailand, for instance, in an effort to bring some standardization to
> official documents and avoid font piracy, has specified a set of thirteen
> customized free fonts – SIPA.zip contains these – but none of these has any
> foundry property defined. They are quite suitable for documents mixing Thai
> and English, but don’t help if some third language is introduced into a
> Writer document as well, particularly if the third language also requires
> CTL. That isn’t actually far-fetched, as they have neighbors that use CTL
> scripts.
>
> Has anyone given much thought to permitting finer-grained control of CTL
> font substitution – e.g. making the CTL font substitutions page similar to
> the Options | LibreOffice | Fonts page used for general font substitution of
> missing fonts. In other words, permitting multiple fonts to have
> substitutions defined? And then also reversing the order of the Complex Text
> Layout section of Tools | Options | Language Settings | Languages from
> [CTL=On, CTL Language=Whatever] to [Language=Whatever and then for each
> language CTL=On]?
>
> I apologize if this sounds like a rant; it's not intended to be - it's just
> a stream of consciousness thing caused by frustration at trying to
> understand this whole subject ...
>
> Thanks in advance for any comments, suggestions, and so forth.
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context: 
> http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Font-versus-Character-Substitution-tp4144195.html
> Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.


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