Thai font feedback for style updates

Right now the main OpenStreetMap.org stylesheet uses Unifont as a fallback for characters not in the DejaVu font. As Unifont is designed to support all characters and not to look good, this can lead to ugly and difficult to read text in parts.

I’m looking at Thai fonts right now and would like some people to evaluate the difference between the “OpenStreetMap” and “Arundina Sans” layers on http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/fonts.html

Some examples

If you aren’t certain you can look at the “No Unifont Fallback” layer to see if there are boxes - if there are on that layer but not the “Arundina Sans” layer, then it’s using the new fonts.

To clarify, since I got some unrelated responses last time, I’m not looking for feedback on glyphs in other scripts (e.g. Chinese) with this test. This test is purely for Thai characters.

Cross-posting to talk@ and OSM Thai forum

Arudina looks better - it is also a little bigger. I’d prefer even bigger Thai fonts…

Agreed. Arundina Sans looks much better.

It looks like the tone characters are being hit by a bug in Mapnik (https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/issues/2161), leading to them being placed too high. I doubt this is going to be fixed immediately, these problems have taken time in the past.
With this bug, do you think it’s still an improvement?

Also, although it looks bigger, the actual font size is the same. The difference has to do with relative heights of letters, and the old font being so ugly.

I’m using Loma, which is also a good font for rendering Thai script.
http://linux.thai.net/projects/thaifonts-scalable

Your map is missing some street names, compare Rattanakosin road with Thaimap. Other roads as well. Might be a mapnik bug. Are you using harfbuzz?
http://tile.paulnorman.ca/demo/fonts.html#18/18.80080/99.00815
http://thaimap.osm-tools.org/?zoom=19&lat=18.80066&lon=99.00838&layers=B000T

Thai font size is better than original OSM. Your Latin script looks too small.
compare rendering of Eurana here:
Yours:

Thaimap:

Mix of Latin/Thai looks promising. I found only examples with Arabic numbers, but the height of these compared to Thai glyphs is fine:

tone marks look fine on Thaimap. Can some native speaker please confirm? Also Thaimap renders a lot more street names in Thai which are simply mission on osm.org. I guess 20% of the names are missing there.

I looked at Loma, but Arundina has better DejaVu compatibility. The data on my server is a couple months old, so it probably has less names for that reason. I’m loading up a new extract to test Khmer, and I’ll refresh the tiles then.

My work is also based on the latest openstreetmap-carto revision, and I 'm not sure what thaimap uses.

The changes have been merged and are now in use on openstreetmap.org. There are the tone character bugs, but we need a new Mapnik release to fix those. There are also the same bugs in nearby countries with similar complicated language features.