i run Kubuntu and when i am editing a document or an image and need to select a font, i am presented with a single scrolling list of all the fonts installed on the system, which is several hundred and includes fonts not only for every language currently used in the world, it also includes languages such as Linear A, which has not been spoken in more than 3500 years! Now it's great that my system can display all these different things, and it's really useful in a multilingual environment such as the social media services i use, but at the same time when i need to find a font to use for my own languages it becomes and overwhelming task! We need to fix this.

What we need is for font selectors to have a way to filter the fonts displayed to you. Preferably a filter by language, though i can see how that would need a lot of work and cooperation from the font package maintainers since the language isn't really a characteristic stored in a font file as i understand. Being able to filter by other characteristics, such as serif/sans serif would also be useful.

i recognize that this is not a small or easy task, but i think it is one that desperately needs a solution. And no, uninstalling fonts is not a solution since that breaks the display of text in social media by people from other countries. Breaking the ability to communicate across international borders is not the solution to managing the list of available fonts.

i really don't know how to get this message to the right people, so i'm throwing it out into the Fediverse in the hope that someone either knows of a good workaround, or can point me in the direction of who to talk to in order to get the conversation about this issue started among the right people.

#debian #ubuntu #gnu #gimp #linux #kde #gnome #fonts