Re: [Pan-users] How to tell Pan to *stop* constantly asking to install fonts?

[Duncan]

Jim Henderson posted on Tue, 23 Jul 2013 00:25:20 +0000 as excerpted:

> On Mon, 22 Jul 2013 22:18:28 +0000, Rock wrote:
> 
>> Quite a few times a day, even when seemingly doing nothing,
>> Pan 0.135 pops up a form asking me to install fonts:
>>  http://i39.tinypic.com/2i7qm2p.png
>> 
>> This latest message says:
>>  Pan newsreader wants to install fonts Thai Cherokee
>> 
>> While Thai and Cherokee are the current request, it seems that various
>> fonts want to install (often Asian), but none of which do I *ever* wish
>> to install!
>> 
>> Is there a way to tell Pan to *never* install fonts and especially to
>> *stop* asking to install fonts?
>> 
>> Incidentally, *why* is Pan constantly asking me to install fonts in the
>> first place?
>> 
>> (If it matters, Firefox does it also.)
> 
> What distribution are you using?  This doesn't look like something from
> pan or firefox, but from your distribution - might have something to do
> with how the distro has packaged the two programs.

I /think/ you're (sort of) wrong in this case, Jim, tho I'll admit to not 
being sure.  Let me explain, tho I don't consider myself an expert in the 
area by far so I can't promise I've got the terminology absolutely 
correct.

Briefly, I believe the prompts are from pan and firefox, but it's the 
i18n (internationalization, i, 18 letters, n, i18n for short) support in 
gtk, pango, or whatever, not from the pan/firefox code itself.

In a bit more detail, what I believe is happening in each case is that 
the web page (firefox) or the news post (pan) is specifying a particular 
character-set code-page (like ASCII, ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8) and there's no 
font on the system that handles it so pan or firefox is prompting to 
install one, presumably using some default code-page-to-default-font 
mapping config as shipped by the package in question (tho the distro may 
modify/extend it) in ordered to be able to ask for specific fonts.

These days, UTF-8 is the common choice in the western world, tho it's not 
as efficient as UTF-16 for Asian characters so they may default to that.  
However, before UTF-* became common, there were over a dozen fairly 
common code-pages, each of which would have required a font with 
appropriately mapped character glyphs, and probably a hundred or more 
less common ones.  In some regions, particularly where the common 
character-set isn't efficiently mapped in UTF-8, the local code-page 
remains a common default, and particularly less technical users with 
older systems will often be using that by default even when they're 
writing in English, because for the audience they're generally writing 
for, it "just works", and they've seen no reason to change.

While it's possible gtk/pango/etc can be configured not to prompt for 
these things, I haven't the foggiest how one would go about it.  
Meanwhile, I don't believe there's a way to tell pan not to prompt for 
such fonts, but setting it to UTF-8 by default /may/ help, and/or 
ensuring that you have a wide-coverage UTF-8 font installed.  Meanwhile, 
you'll get more or fewer such prompts depending on the groups you 
frequent and the languages of the posters.

Again, just because someone happen to be using English for a particular 
post, doesn't mean that they have their client set to use the common UTF-8 
or ISO-8859-1 code-pages. since many code-pages (certainly the western 
ones) support basic English characters as well.  After all, computer 
programs are normally written in English and may not be fully localized, 
so basic 7-bit ASCII  support tends to be required even of rather more 
exotic code-pages.  That means they can write in English in many other 
code-pages and wouldn't even realize they're not using the standard 
ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 code-pages and thus causing many of their western 
readers trouble.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman