Arch Linux User Repository

What's up with all these split packages?

That's a lot of split packages, I suggest that you start by reading the fonts formats documentation in the README.md files of the Sans or Serif fonts before asking what you should install.

There are 3 types of packages here:

• noto-fonts-cjk-vf: Variable OTCs
  It's recommended to set the LANG or LANGUAGE environment variables (e.g. LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8),
  which will select the correct glyphs.
  Without it, the fonts will likely fall back to Japanese glyphs when the language of a text cannot be defined or
  auto-recognized (or too costly to recognize) by the application, and the OpenType locl is not being set.
  Other environment variables: FC_LANG, PANGO_LANGUAGE.
  For this to work correctly, HarfBuzz 3.3.0 or newer is required, see more details below.
• noto-fonts-cjk{-language}-vf: Variable Multilingual OTF
  Multi-lingual CJK with a default language set for applications that don't apply OpenType locl.
  You can still set LANG or LANGUAGE environment variables and this setting will be respected,
  but if you don't then it will use the default language set in the font.
• noto-fonts{-language}-vf: Variable Region-specific OTF
  Containing only a subset version of the font for a specific language.
  Multi-lingual monospace font is packaged because there aren't subset versions of monospace fonts.
  I'm not completely sure about the font config for the monospace font, so feedback would be appreciated.

Variable OTCs and HarfBuzz <3.0.0

Before HarfBuzz 3.3.0, the Variable OTCs fonts were pretty much unusable with apps that use Pango for rendering fonts.
It was possible to make them sorta work by explicitly configuring apps to load the specific regional/language
font variant (e.g. Noto Sans CJK SC), and by using the <alias> and <prefer> elements in fonts.conf (see details in the Arch Wiki),
but it was a hit-and-miss, and it should have worked without any extra setting, automatically loading the missing glyphs from the fonts.
From what I can tell, it's fixed in HarfBuzz 3.3.0 and newer releases, but anything that brings it own
outdated libharfbuzz.so will still be broken. This means Flatpak, AppImage, proprietary, etc.
I suspect that Electron releases older than v14 are also affected by this.
My MR backporting the needed changes to the Freedesktop Flatpak runtime was merged,
and this issue is fixed now for applications that use the following runtimes or newer: Freedesktop 21.08, Gnome 41, KDE 5.15-21.08.

Updates

• 2022-08-20: Gnome 41 Flatpak runtime was updated to 41.8 and is based on Freedesktop 21.08.14 that includes the fix to HarfBuzz 3.0.0.
• 2022-08-17: The Variable OTCs issue of HarfBuzz <3.3.0 is also affecting Electron releases older than v14.
• 2022-08-07: Release assets were updated without tagging a new release. If you're upgrading this package(s) and your AUR helper is caching sources, then you might need to delete the cached tarballs.
• 2022-05-21: Freedesktop 21.08, Gnome 42, KDE 5.15-21.08, and KDE 6.2 Flatpak runtimes were updated, and they now include the HarfBuzz patch.
• 2022-04-01: The issue affecting Variable OTCs is related to HarfBuzz and was fixed in version 3.3.0.
  This is fixed not only for system installed applications, but soon also with Flatpak applications that
  use runtimes based on Freedesktop 21.08, as the runtime's libharfbuzz 3.0.0 is patched with the fix.
• 2022-02-23: A section about OpenType issue with Pango apps was added.
• 2022-01-26: There are now variable Serif fonts for all the languages. The generated packages are much smaller.

@omasanori sorry, I'm not sure why it fails for you, I see no issue when building in updated chroot with aurutils or directly with makepkg. If you're using an AUR helper, then try instead to run makepkg directly.

The following error occurs during builds though it attempts to workaround in the PKGBUILD:

../LICENSE: Path contains '..': No such file or directory

bsdtar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.

==> ERROR: Failed to extract noto-cjk-serif-2.001.zip

The version of bsdtar is bsdtar 3.6.1 - libarchive 3.6.1 zlib/1.2.12 liblzma/5.2.5 bz2lib/1.0.8 liblz4/1.9.3 libzstd/1.5.2

Update: I reported upstream: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-cjk/issues/225

What's up with all these split packages?

That's a lot of split packages, I suggest that you start by reading the fonts formats documentation in the README.md files of the Sans or Serif fonts before asking what you should install.

There are 3 types of packages here:

• noto-fonts-cjk-vf: Variable OTCs
  It's recommended to set the LANG or LANGUAGE environment variables (e.g. LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8),
  which will select the correct glyphs.
  Without it, the fonts will likely fall back to Japanese glyphs when the language of a text cannot be defined or
  auto-recognized (or too costly to recognize) by the application, and the OpenType locl is not being set.
  Other environment variables: FC_LANG, PANGO_LANGUAGE.
  For this to work correctly, HarfBuzz 3.3.0 or newer is required, see more details below.
• noto-fonts-cjk{-language}-vf: Variable Multilingual OTF
  Multi-lingual CJK with a default language set for applications that don't apply OpenType locl.
  You can still set LANG or LANGUAGE environment variables and this setting will be respected,
  but if you don't then it will use the default language set in the font.
• noto-fonts{-language}-vf: Variable Region-specific OTF
  Containing only a subset version of the font for a specific language.
  Multi-lingual monospace font is packaged because there aren't subset versions of monospace fonts.
  I'm not completely sure about the font config for the monospace font, so feedback would be appreciated.

Variable OTCs and HarfBuzz <3.0.0

Before HarfBuzz 3.3.0, the Variable OTCs fonts were pretty much unusable with apps that use Pango for rendering fonts.
It was possible to make them sorta work by explicitly configuring apps to load the specific regional/language
font variant (e.g. Noto Sans CJK SC), and by using the <alias> and <prefer> elements in fonts.conf (see details in the Arch Wiki),
but it was a hit-and-miss, and it should have worked without any extra setting, automatically loading the missing glyphs from the fonts.
From what I can tell, it's fixed in HarfBuzz 3.3.0 and newer releases, but anything that brings it own
outdated libharfbuzz.so will still be broken. This means Flatpak, AppImage, proprietary, etc.
I suspect that Electron releases older than v14 are also affected by this.
My MR backporting the needed changes to the Freedesktop Flatpak runtime was merged,
and this issue is fixed now for applications that use the following runtimes or newer: Freedesktop 21.08, Gnome 41, KDE 5.15-21.08.

Updates

• 2022-08-20: Gnome 41 Flatpak runtime was updated to 41.8 and is based on Freedesktop 21.08.14 that includes the fix to HarfBuzz 3.0.0.
• 2022-08-17: The Variable OTCs issue of HarfBuzz <3.3.0 is also affecting Electron releases older than v14.
• 2022-08-07: Release assets were updated without tagging a new release. If you're upgrading this package(s) and your AUR helper is caching sources, then you might need to delete the cached tarballs.
• 2022-05-21: Freedesktop 21.08, Gnome 42, KDE 5.15-21.08, and KDE 6.2 Flatpak runtimes were updated, and they now include the HarfBuzz patch.
• 2022-04-01: The issue affecting Variable OTCs is related to HarfBuzz and was fixed in version 3.3.0.
  This is fixed not only for system installed applications, but soon also with Flatpak applications that
  use runtimes based on Freedesktop 21.08, as the runtime's libharfbuzz 3.0.0 is patched with the fix.
• 2022-02-23: A section about OpenType issue with Pango apps was added.
• 2022-01-26: There are now variable Serif fonts for all the languages. The generated packages are much smaller.