[OSM-talk] CJK fallback fonts - testing needed

[Christoph Hormann]

On Sunday 12 January 2014, Paul Norman wrote:
> Right now the main OpenStreetMap.org stylesheet uses Unifont as a
> fallback font to render Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK)
> characters, as well as any other characters not present in the DejaVu
> font. Unifont is mainly designed to support all characters, and is
> not designed to look good.

The problems with the fonts are not at all limited to CJK - Arabic and 
other languages using Arabic script are not well readable either.  As 
Hans Schmidt said much of this is related to size - in a unified font 
the non-latin scripts are usually arbitrarily scaled to fit into a 
latin line geometry.

In your demo the alternative fallbacks do not seem to contain Arabic 
characters - the missing glyphs are however often the ones worst to 
read in the normal rendering (although the other ones are not great 
either).

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/