Cyril Brulebois <k...@debian.org> (2024-12-28): > Using motoyalcedar would mean an extra 2 MB in the initramfs, which > looks like a lot compared to 3 MB for fonts-android-udeb, so maybe it'd > be worth thinking a little more about this before submitting a udeb > addition to src:fonts-motoya-l-cedar and adding it to pkg-lists.
With that udeb added, build/tmp/netboot-gtk/tree/usr/share/fonts/truetype/
contains a total of 12 MB worth of *.ttf files.
The biggest (over 1 MB) are:
1.4M
./build/tmp/netboot-gtk/tree/usr/share/fonts/truetype/tibetan-machine/TibMachUni-1.901b.ttf
1.9M
./build/tmp/netboot-gtk/tree/usr/share/fonts/truetype/motoya-l-cedar/MTLc3m.ttf
3.3M
./build/tmp/netboot-gtk/tree/usr/share/fonts/truetype/droid/DroidSansFallback.ttf
As far as I understand, DroidSansFallback.ttf is automatically used when
things aren't available in the default font, which we set to "DejaVu
Sans".
Other fonts are selected explicitly via gtk-set-font and maybe we could
limit the size increase (+20%) by having some fonts compressed in the
initramfs (so that they eat up less RAM for everyone), and uncompress
them on the fly when a language that uses them is chosen?
For example motoya-l-cedar/MTLc3m.ttf when "ja" is chosen, or
tibetan-machine/TibMachUni-1.901b when "dz" or "bo" are chosen.
Compressed, those would take:
324K
./build/tmp/netboot-gtk/tree/usr/share/fonts/truetype/tibetan-machine/TibMachUni-1.901b.ttf.xz
1.1M
./build/tmp/netboot-gtk/tree/usr/share/fonts/truetype/motoya-l-cedar/MTLc3m.ttf.xz
so 1.5 MB instead of 3.3 MB (thus making the udeb addition almost
cost-free overall).
Compressing every *.ttf file would shrink the total from 12 MB to 4.6 MB
but would mean uncompress operations in a lot of cases, that's why my
initial assessment would be that limiting this to “big fonts, specific
languages” might be the best compromise. Note that I didn't check
whether fontconfig knows how to deal with compressed fonts in the first
place, and I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about this anyway…
(Idea brought to you by having the “compressed Linux kernel modules”
topic in mind, which was fun some time ago.)
Cheers,
--
Cyril Brulebois (k...@debian.org) <https://debamax.com/>
D-I release manager -- Release team member -- Freelance Consultant
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