Awful greek gnome fonts

Created an attachment (id=3690)
screenshot of the bug

Is this addressed by the addition of ttf-mgopen?

Last time i checked a few days ago, this bug was still affecting my breezy
install (installed from breezy preview CD, with mgopen & msttforefonts
installed, and all updates aplied). I tried some random dpkg-reconfigure's but
that didn't help. Unfortunately I'm not at my ubuntu box right now so I can't
investigate more :( .

I tried replacing /etc/fonts/fonts.conf with a copy from hoary, but that didn't
help at all. Installing Microsoft fonts resolved it, but that's not a real
solution; after all greek was working perfectly by default on hoary. I have no
idea what else to try. BTW, it seems firefox is not affected by this.

Hi,
 I tested 25 Sept night build and the problem is still there. Tff-mgopen is
installed and language-support-el is installed.

I got the same problem, text in Greek looks like
http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/attachment.cgi?id=3690

My catch is that an Asian font (baekmuk batang?), which has Greek characters,
is selected to show Greek, though as a font it's unsuitable.
In Hoary, FreeSans/FreeSerif was used, so this is a regression.

MgOpen gets installed by default, though they are not used as first choice to
display Greek.
Does fontconfig know about MgOpen/FreeFonts?

I tried a few things and here are my results.

The first choice to render Greek text (default installation of Ubuntu Breezy)
is "arphic" (/usr/share/fonts/arphic/).
Once "arphic" is gone, the next font automatically chosen for Greek is "kochi".
Now, once "kochi" is removed, the next font automatically chosen for Greek is
"baekmuk".
Until now, all these fonts are Asian fonts and Greek shows really poorly with them.

Once "baekmuk" is also removed, then the default font chosen for Greek is FreeSans.

Therefore, the issue has to do with fontconfig that cannot ignore
arphic/kochi/baekmuk to render Greek.

The font order is specified in
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf

and specifically the section

<alias>
                <family>Bitstream Vera Sans</family>
                <family>Helvetica</family>
                <family>Arial</family>
                <family>Verdana</family>
                <family>Albany AMT</family>
                <family>Nimbus Sans L</family>
                <family>Luxi Sans</family>
                <family>Kochi Gothic</family>
                <family>AR PL KaitiM GB</family>
                <family>AR PL KaitiM Big5</family>
                <family>ＭＳ ゴシック</family>
                <family>Baekmuk Dotum</family>
                <family>SimSun</family>
                <family>FreeSans</family>
                <default><family>sans-serif</family></default>
</alias>

In a default Ubuntu Linux installation, Greek glyphs are drawn from
1. BitStream Vera Sans (very few letters, such as pi (π), omega (ω))
2. Kochi Gothic
3. AR PL KaitiM GB
4. Baekmuk Dotum
5. FreeSans
in this order.

Ubuntu-desktop specifies that the desktop font is "Sans", and through font
substitution, fontconfig chooses from what is available.
FreeSans is quite good to render Greek, though it has too low order to be used;
the asian fonts get preference.

Sadly, a minority of greek users believe that the "solution" is to install the
mscorefonts package; this happen to work because Arial, Verdana are already
early on the fontconfig list. I hope they read and understand this entry.

What is required here is to instruct fontconfig that the three Asian fonts,
1. Kochi Gothic
2. AR PL KaitiM GB
3. Baekmuk Dotum
are not suitable to display Greek, and other fonts should have a chance.

How can this be done?

Created an attachment (id=4263)
Patch for /etc/fonts/fonts.conf to fix Greek

Elevates the preference to the FreeFonts fonts, so that they get selected as
Sans/Serif/Mono fonts when showing Greek.

As is, the default preference for the FreeFonts is too low, and certain Eastern
fonts are used to display Greek. The Easter fonts are unsuitable as they are
full width, slanted, missing characters with accents, etc.

We also tried the MgOpen Greek fonts on Ubuntu and we noticed that they do not
look as good as FreeFonts. It appears it is some configuration issue, as on
SuSE 9.3 Pro, MgOpen look really amazing.

Please apply this patch, as without it, Greek on the desktop does not work.

Thanks for looking into this. But won't this have an impact on displaying Asian
fonts, too? It looks as if Asian text would then be prefered to render with mgopen?

(In reply to comment #10)
> Thanks for looking into this. But won't this have an impact on displaying Asian
> fonts, too? It looks as if Asian text would then be prefered to render with
mgopen?

The MgOpen fonts cover the Latin and Greek Unicode groups only.

The MgOpen Latin group is masked by Bitstream Vera, Nimbus Sans L, Luxi Sans, so
it not appear at all.
The MgOpen Greek group will be used in a default Ubuntu installation, as the
higher preference fonts do not have Greek. The Greek Unicode group in MgOpen
will indeed mask the greek glyphs in the Asian fonts (desirable).
If a user installs Arial/Times New Roman, these fonts will be prefered due to
the location we added the reference to MgOpen.
All in all, it should be ok.

In case you need to verify, you can run gucharmap (Character Map) and observe
the Latin/Greek Unicode blocks; right click on the glyphs and it will tell you
which font it is using for the current glyph.

Simo's patch works fine for greek installations.
This is a very important bug and because it doesn't affect asian or other
languages, I think that it should be applied.

I checked the patch and cross-checked with Chinese and Japanese; Greek looked
fine afterwards, and I did not see any apparent regression with Japanese nor
Chinese.

I can't upload right now since we are in deep Release Candidate freeze. I will
try to get permission to upload this directly after RC, so that we get it for
the final.

Thanks a lot for your investigations so far!

 fontconfig (2.3.2-1ubuntu4) breezy; urgency=low
 .
   * fonts.conf.in:
     - Register MgOpen font (with a higher priority than the Asian fonts, since
       the Greek glyphs in those look ugly).
     - Raise FreeSans and FreeMono priorities since its Greek and latin glyphs
       looks much better.
     - Ubuntu #15108