[am-translate] The best font

[Daniel Yacob]

Tegegne,

Try the very newly released Abyssinica:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=AbyssinicaSIL

The english typeface is very similar to Times Roman and has
pretty strong quality.  The default font that Ubuntu uses for
Ethiopic is the FreeMono font (or FreeSerif) which is based on
the Metafont from the Ethiop Babel package.

I've been frustrated that the new gnome-terminal has removed the
-font option to let you specify a font.  I think the GNOME policy
now is to make you configure fonts through their preferences
widget.  I've got to figure out fast how to get the fixed fonts
working that I'm used to.  Proportional fonts in terminals just
don't work.

I'll try to focus on fonts for this week, to figure out the
system Ubuntu is using.  One thing we should target is to
make an extra package of ethiopic fonts.  This optional package
would include configuration for the fixed fonts, plus a
collection of the free TrueType ethiopic fonts -but with the
non-ethiopic letters stripped out.  When the Latin letters
are not present in the font, the font service is smart
enough to use the default Latin font, this is what the
hindic fonts do.  I tried hacking the font cache metadata to
trick the server into thinking the ethiopic TT fonts had
no latin, but it didn't work at all, its too smart.

/Daniel