When you open the drop-down fonts list in apps like writer, gimp or whatever, it’s hard to browse and choose appropriate fonts.
Also, noto-fonts-core and noto-fonts-core-ui as meta-packages pulls a lot of fonts families in addition. I’ve checked ubuntu 22.04 live cd, and there is only noto-fonts-mono and noto-fonts-emoji packages installed by default, and as far as I can remember, there is no Indian, Thai etc. fonts as well, which is a good relief. Very clean and minimal.
In addition we default to noto based fonts
I don’t understand what dev’s don’t understand here about users experience…
Font managing ( not only in Linux ) is not easy, there are no « smart » tools around it, not sure what are the « rules » and conventions about handling fonts : system wide / user side / per app / not to set font as a dependence…
In any Linux installation, first wasting time thing to do is getting rid of the dozens fonts which I don’t need given the languages I deal with.
Why do that ? Because all these fonts appear in any app’ ! And by chance I daily use at work LibreOffice, Gimp, Scribus and many other heavy editors where choosing / searching / installing / removing fonts is part of my daily tasks…
Why installing all alphabets since OS-installer asked your main language and area ? ? ?
I understand a distro should address any language in the world - and I love it - but it’s not needed in each installation of a distro.
Defaulting to Noto is both a good and a bad thing. Good because it covers almost any language. Bad for the same reason : does one user need to see the whole choice of alphabets in all his app’s ?
There should be a tool to mute the non-needed fonts without breaking further updating and dependencies.
If I don’t need Noto fonts, it’s quite a pain to remove them… And I need to remove them because I don’t want to see their whole list in my app’s, where I only want to see the dozens / hundreds fonts I personally choose to use in my projects.
It’s a real use-case and real questions here, no bitterness at all.
Feels like there is an opportunity here for someone/some people to come up with a font uninstaller/installer. Kind of a one click “essentials” button with other options to install/uninstall fonts depending on a) chosen language/locale and user preference.
Here is the bash script for removing all oriental fonts:
#!/bin/bash
# www.riksoft.it/wikiriks
# Remove all oriental fonts in Mint 18 (surely OK for Ubuntu 16 as well)
for i in fonts-kacst fonts-kacst-one fonts-khmeros-core fonts-lklug-sinhala fonts-guru fonts-nanum fonts-noto-cjk fonts-takao-pgothic fonts-tibetan-machine fonts-guru-extra fonts-lao fonts-sil-padauk fonts-sil-abyssinica fonts-tlwg-* fonts-lohit-* fonts-beng fonts-beng-extra fonts-gargi fonts-gubbi fonts-gujr fonts-gujr-extra fonts-kalapi fonts-lohit-gujr fonts-noto-unhinted fonts-noto-hinted fonts-navilu fonts-nakula fonts-orya-extra fonts-pagul fonts-sahadeva fonts-sarai fonts-smc fonts-telu-extra fonts-wqy-microhei; do
sudo apt purge -y $i
echo
done
echo "==== Fixing font cache"
sudo fc-cache -f -v && sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
echo "==== Packages remained (each containing multiple fonts)"
dpkg -l fonts\*|grep ^ii|awk '{print $2}'
echo
read -p "Press any key to close."
You can read more about here:
https://www.riksoft.it/wikiriks/linux/remove-foreign-fonts-get-rid-asian-oriental-fonts
It’s kind of fonts uninstaller, as you can add or remove fonts as you wish.
In my opinion, what most of us would like to see is option within system installer to check/uncheck fonts, for example. What I would like to see at least, is that minimal install .iso would be delivered with only minimal amount of fonts installed like stated at the page provided:
Basically in Linux Mint the font packages useful for english, italian, french, german, etc, are only these (everyone contains multiple fonts):