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 _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
