High-contrast fonts as alternative fonts

[sommerluk]

Resolves #2692

[pnorman]

I still feel that overall this change makes the cartography worse.

[kocio-pl]

That's why I'd like to hear someone using non-latin scripts to comment. It could make western world look worse, but help some other parts of the world look better, which would be good for universal map diversity. So I want to know if/how it really works for the rest of the world.

[kocio-pl]

I'd like to know what the people who commented #2496 think about this change. @saeedghazijoolaee, @jojo4u, @lyxys, @BoFFire, what's your opinion?

[sommerluk]

As #2496 was about the arabic script, it might be worth to say that this PR does not change the rendering of the arabic script.

(Our current arabic font, “Noto Naskh Arabic”, is indeed a high-contrast font yet. As there are no alternatives, we use it for both, @regular and @oblique. In the upcoming Noto Phase III, there will be additionally an Arabic Sans in many weights and widths which will have low contrast. So after the release of Noto Phase III, we could treat the currently used Naskh font as @oblique and in contrast use the new Arabic Sans as @regular…)

[kocio-pl]

Sorry for misunderstanding. This font topic is beyond my expertise (and pretty complicated, since I've read it few times and still don't follow), but it's not about me - I'd like to know what real people using different scripts are thinking.

So, what language/country communities could be a target we should ask? We can probably contact with the most active/biggest ones on the forum and generally on the Talk list.

[sommerluk]

Language communities following Wikipedia:

• For CJK script: chinese (in all its dialects), japanese and korean.
• For Devanagari script: Hindi, Marathi, Konkani, Nepali, Sanskrit
• For Bengali script: Sanskrit, Bengali, Assamese, Kokborok, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Khasi, Meitei Manipuri, Hajong and Sylheti
• For Malayalam script: Malayalam

I think anyway this is not a complet change of font. We stay within the same font superfamily and change only the font face (for a limited scope of labels).

[kocio-pl]

Thanks! Could you also put some before/after renderings for all these scripts, so people see what is changing?

[sommerluk]

Left before. Right after.

Latin script:

CJK script:

CJK script:

Devanagari script:

Bengali script:

The water color difference is independent from this PR.

BTW: On older maps, usage of serif fonts is quite common.

[kocio-pl]

I also don't like serif fonts in western scripts, but could accept it if other scripts would gain something this way. However on these screenshots I see no change, so I'm against merging this code.

[sommerluk]

I see no change

It affects water features and landuse features. There is a difference in the screenshots, but of course more subtile than for the Latin regular vs italic.

[kocio-pl]

I'm closing it, because problems are visible, gains are subtle (if any) and there was no support from users of other scripts.