Tahoma fonts and Greek language

[Erich E. Hoover]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 2:32 AM, Huw Davies <huw at codeweavers.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 11:07:26AM +0300, Petros F wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> When you install wine in a PC with Greek language, or run a program that
>> requires or uses Greek fonts, the fonts could not appear correctly because of
>> the pre-installed tahoma font which it hasn't Greek letters for some reason. So
>> the user has to change the font manually to another font or to paste a Greek
>> tahoma font into /usr/share/fonts or /home/.fonts folder.
>> I was wondering if it is possible to include these tahoma fonts (that have
>> Greek letters) and the procedure of their installation in the wine
>> installation?
>
> No, of course not.  You'll have to draw the Greek glyphs yourself.

Hi Petros,

I think it's necessary to further clarify Huw's email.  The copyright
on the original Tahoma font prohibits Wine from distributing it, so we
cannot include it in the project.  The replacement font Wine uses for
Tahoma is a modified version of "Bitstream Vera Sans," which,
unfortunately, does not include Greek characters.  However, a quick
Google search reveals that there is a modified version of this font
with Greek characters:
http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Bitstream_Vera_derivatives#Arev_Fonts

So, if you're willing to look into any possible license conflicts (and
find that there are none) then you could potentially use FontForge to
merge these glyphs into the font Wine uses and submit a patch to the
font.  If you require help with this process then feel free to ask.
You can also open a bug in the bug tracker (http://bugs.winehq.org/),
which might help others that encounter the same problem to find your
workarounds.

Best,
Erich