Long time no see, old friends (since April last year).

If you regularly read Japanese or Chinese text on Ubuntu, this post is a request for your help. If you don't, then skip on by.

In the 12.10 cycle, we eliminated fontconfig-voodoo, which was a script that enabled certain font configurations based on the locale of the user running language-selector (or driving fontconfig-voodoo manually from the command line). It was always intended to be a temporary measure pending proper support for locales in fontconfig itself. Since that has arrived now, in 12.10 we made use of this functionality to eliminate fontconfig-voodoo altogether.

It wasn't quite right though. Some users weren't seeing their fontconfig configuration applied when it should have been.

I've been working on that a bit this week and last by trying to tweak the configurations we're shipping to make the applications happen when they should, and also moving the configurations out to the font packages they refer to, instead of being in a centralised location (language-selector-common). However I can't read Japanese or Chinese text so that's where you, dear reader who hasn't skipped over this post, come in.

If you can reproduce the original bug — seeing badly rendered Japenese or Chinese text on Raring — then please upgrade to my PPA with the proposed fixes and report back in the bug whether they help you or not. Without your feedback, we won't be able to achieve as high a quality end result as is possible, because I'll be flying blind.