Max Harmathy

LiMux, which started as a project to introduce a free desktop environment base system for the city administration of Munich, operated successfully from the project's formal completion in 2013 until now, but got politically abandoned by 2017 and is expected to vanish in the coming years. Despite that its name still spreads significant prominence. As former LiMuxers, we will offer this ad-hoc session for all who want to know about the political backgrounds (as far as we know). And about technical and organisational matters.

During and After my talk “Linux Font Rendering Stack” I was approached and asked about issues in the font rendering stack for users of non-latin script. - Linux VT (text console) is pretty much useless for non-latin scripts - Japanese users get Chinese variants of some characters In this BoF we will discuss these and other problems and possible solutions. It is open to everyone interested.

Displaying text is the most common interface to convey information from computer systems to humans. On a Linux system there is a variety of techniques for rendering text some of which are used more or less on modern systems. Many of those text rendering techniques originate from different time periods of computing history and rendering text in graphical environments is more complex than often thought off. We find two approaches in Linux systems for displaying text: - using bitmap fonts designed for fixed resolution displays - rendering text based on scalable glyph shapes using a stack of software components for rasterisation, text shaping and text layout. This talk will give an overview on the different techniques, software and standards for font rendering on Linux systems in the context of their historical origins. [Slides (PDF)](https://salsa.debian.org/debconf-team/public/data/misc/blob/master/talks/dc18/fontrendering.pdf "Slides (PDF)")