Missing fonts in the OOBE

[jibel]

There are several missing fonts in the OOBE.
If it's languages we do not support they should be removed.
If we support these languages then the fonts should be added, but then the impact on image size must be estimated.

[CarlosNihelton]

To keep a log of experiments, the following three packages we can cover an expressive amount of users who speak Japanese, Chinese or Korean: fonts-arphic-uming fonts-ipafont-mincho fonts-unfonts-core at a cost of 31 MB compressed and 84 MB uncompressed.

[jibel]

The problem is that ipafonts and unfonts-core are in universe.
What would it cost to ship the same list than a desktop iso or a subset of it ?

There are currently 102 fonts on the live image:
desktop-fonts.txt

[CarlosNihelton]

We can go pretty far with fonts-droid-fallback and fonts-opensymbol (and their dependencies fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core libfontconfig1), at a cost of 3.7 MB compressed and 13.1 MB expanded. That would lack support for Korean, though.

I could not find a font package other than fonts-noto-cjk with support for Korean language. All by itself, Noto CJK costs 61.2 MB of archives, 93.2 MB after decompression. Combining it with fonts-opensymbol, to support languages like Hebrew, would add very little more (62.7 MB / 97.6 MB total).

Quite big difference to add Korean to the table.

[jibel]

Okay so maybe the approach should be different and remove some of the languages that are wrongly displayed, then find a balance between the size of the image (and fonts that should be added) and the list of languages available in the list.

What is the list of languages that are wrongly displayed and the corresponding font to support that language with its compressed size?

[CarlosNihelton]

We currently lack translations for most of the languages we would need fonts for. Of course this may change at any time, but for now those are the languages we have at least partial translations but lack fonts for, alongside with the packages that may provide those fonts and their compressed sizes.

Locale	Native Name	International Name	Lines Translated	Font Package (Deps); Alternatives	Compressed Size
vi_VN	Tiếng Việt	Vietnamese (Vietnam)	58	fonts-opensymbol (fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core libfontconfig1)	1481 kB
he_IL	עברית	Hebrew (Israel)	132	fonts-opensymbol (fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core libfontconfig1)	1481 kB
ml_IN	മലയാളം	Malayalam (India)	114	fonts-lohit-mlym	32.9 kB
zh_CN	中文（简体）	Chinese (Simplified, China)	57	fonts-noto-cjk; fonts-droid-fallback (fonts-noto-mono)	61.2 MB; 2202 kB
ko_KR	한국어	Korean (South Korea)	128	fonts-noto-cjk	61.2 MB

[CarlosNihelton]

My plan is to sort out whether will we add any fonts or not and keep the inventory of languages for which we lack font support in the Flutter GUI code. With that we don't completely remove those languages from the UI list, but instead just avoid the UI from changing itself when users select any of those. It will still be possible for users to submit any of those languages to Subiquity to get the locale and language-packs installed in the end, if they wanted to. During the whole installation process, though, the UI will stay in the default locale (English).

[CarlosNihelton]

If you wan to see the complete view of which languages require specific fonts as of now and to what extent their WSL UI strings have been translated so far, there you go:

Locale	Native Name	International Name	Lines Translated	Font Package (Deps)	Compressed Size
vi_VN	Tiếng Việt	Vietnamese (Vietnam)	58	fonts-opensymbol (fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core libfontconfig1)	1481 kB
he_IL	עברית	Hebrew (Israel)	132	fonts-opensymbol (fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core libfontconfig1)	1481 kB
ug_CN	ئۇيغۇرچە	Uyghur (China)	0	fonts-opensymbol (fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core libfontconfig1)	1481 kB
ar_EG	عربي	Arabic (Egypt)	0	fonts-opensymbol (fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core libfontconfig1)	1481 kB
fa_IR	فارسی	Persian (Iran)	0	fonts-opensymbol (fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core libfontconfig1)	1481 kB
ne_NP	नेपाली	Nepali (Nepal)	0	fonts-lohit-deva; fonts-gargi	78.9 kB; 42.4 kB
mr_IN	मराठी	Marathi (India)	0	fonts-lohit-deva; fonts-gargi	78.9 kB; 42.4 kB
hi_IN	हिन्दी	Hindi (India)	0	fonts-lohit-deva; fonts-gargi	78.9 kB; 42.4 kB
bn_BD	বাংলা	Bangla (Bangladesh)	0
pa_IN	ਪੰਜਾਬੀ	Punjabi (India)	0
gu_IN	ગુજરાતી	Gujarati (India)	0
ta_IN	தமிழ்	Tamil (India)	0
te_IN	తెలుగు	Telugu (India)	0
kn_IN	ಕನ್ನಡ	Kannada (India)	0
ml_IN	മലയാളം	Malayalam (India)	114	fonts-lohit-mlym	32.9 kB
si_LK	සිංහල	Sinhala (Sri Lanka)	0
th_TH	ภาษาไทย	Thai (Thailand)	0
bo_IN	བོད་ཡིག	Tibetan (India)	0
dz_BT	རྫོང་ཁ།	Dzongkha (Bhutan)	0
ka_GE	ქართული	Georgian (Georgia)	0	fonts-opensymbol (fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core libfontconfig1)	1481 kB
am_ET	አማርኛ	Amharic (Ethiopia)	0
zh_CN	中文（简体）	Chinese (Simplified, China)	57	fonts-noto-cjk; fonts-droid-fallback (fonts-noto-mono)	61.2 MB; 2202 kB
ja_JP	日本語	Japanese (Japan)	0	fonts-noto-cjk; fonts-droid-fallback (fonts-noto-mono)	61.2 MB; 2202 kB
ko_KR	한국어	Korean (South Korea)	128	fonts-noto-cjk	61.2 MB
lo_LA	ລາວ	Lao (Laos)	0	fonts-opensymbol (fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core libfontconfig1)	1481 kB
my_MM	မြန်မာစာ	Burmese (Myanmar [Burma])	0
km_KH	ខ្មែរ	Khmer (Cambodia)	0

[jibel]

Thank you for the analysis. We cannot afford to add more than 60MB to the image and we plan to move the OOBE entirely to Windows so for the moment, lets decide not to add any font and go with your idea to add a list of languages to keep in English.
That's a good compromise and we will reconsider it when the migration to Windows is done since font handling will be different.