[OSM-talk] CJK fallback fonts - testing needed

[Hans Schmidt]

Am 12.01.2014 18:30, schrieb Christoph Hormann:
>
> 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).
>

Yes, as I said (actually I have done this several times before :D):
Create custom style sheets for every country. Even Germany could use a
different style sheet than UK. The matter is even more severe for
completely other countries.

Let every country/language group create their own style sheet (own
colours, own fonts etc) which will be active in their country. The OSM
web page should then use *those* stylesheets when rendering the global map.

A common style sheet guide can help creating a familiar “OSM style” over
country borders, but it can still be changed to make country specific
changes possible.

A large and difficult change in the software? Yes. The only way to make
OSM really globally usuable? In my opinion definitely.

Take a look at Google Maps, where every country looks slightly
different, but still has a common appearance.

Start a fund raising campain for this. I would definitely spend money
for that.

Or, if you are fine with restricting OSM only to Europe/America, then
this is fine as well. But then don’t call OSM a “map of the world”.