Change default Amharic font from Abyssinica SIL to Noto Serif Ethiopic

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1945817/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

It's more of a general Ubuntu thing. Maybe font-config? Hopefully a packager sees this and helps me out.

Thanks! Is there anything I can help out with?

Hi carnage-mode,

Thanks for your report. We could make it install fonts-noto-core by default when you install the Amharic language. That package provides both "Noto Serif Ethiopic" and "Noto Sans Ethiopic".

As a test, can you please run these commands:

sudo apt purge fonts-sil-abyssinica
sudo apt install fonts-noto-core

and let us know if the result is an improved rendering of Amharic.

Hey @carnage-mode, where did you go? ;)

I have looked a bit more into this, and my understanding is that there are two packages — fonts-sil-abyssinica and fonts-freefont-ttf — with fonts which can render Amharic and which are installed by default on Ubuntu.

But only by installing fonts-noto-core, without uninstalling any of the others, I notice a significant difference at e.g. <https://am.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%8A%A0%E1%88%9B%E1%88%AD%E1%8A%9B> since it makes use of "Noto Sans Ethiopic".

Final freeze for Ubuntu 21.10 is tomorrow, but if you confirm very soon that it would be helpful, I can change it so that fonts-noto-core is automatically installed if you install the Amharic language. If you would like to see more extensive tweaks, it will need to be discussed further after the Ubuntu 21.10 release.

Let me know.

@gunnarhj it will be helpful 100%. You can change it

Sorry for not being able to reply :)

This bug was fixed in the package language-selector - 0.216

---------------
language-selector (0.216) impish; urgency=medium

  * data/pkg_depends:
    - Pull fcitx5-frontend-gtk4 for Chinese. (This is merely for
      consistency reasons — it's pulled by fcitx5 too.)
    - Pull fonts-noto-core for Amharic (LP: #1945817)
  * Bump Standards-Version to 4.6.0

 -- Gunnar Hjalmarsson <email address hidden> Wed, 06 Oct 2021 16:21:16 +0200