Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/1] Add poppler-with-data.

From: Taiju HIGASHI <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2022 09:55:27 +0900

Hi,

You're absolutely right.
This patch can only alleviate the pain, it cannot eliminate it.

This was a painstaking effort to accommodate users who do not use CJK,
but if you would consider making poppler-with-data a replacement for
poppler, that would be better.

> Unlike Nix, we don't have feature options (not until Ludo pushes the
> code to add them, at least, but that too appears to be at least one
> core-updates cycle away), so it's either the all-or-nothing approach
> of having or not having it as input to poppler, or the environment
> variable.  Looking at the output of `guix size', poppler takes up
> 138.1 MiB on a disk with 7.3 MiB being poppler itself, whereas
> poppler-data takes up 12.4 MiB.  I personally think that tradeoff to
> be worth it as in "let's include poppler-data in poppler so as to not
> discriminate against our Non-Latin script users".  It's an increase of
> less than 10% to support clearly more than 10% of the world's
> population (though how many of them use PDFs is an uncertain number).

I'm on the minority side, so I can't speak strongly, but I'd be very
happy if you would consider bundling poppler-data with poppler by
default.

I had a strong desire to use Guix, so I solved small problems on my own.
However, people who are just trying out Guix may decide that Guix is
useless just because it cannot display Japanese PDFs.

Displaying and outputting PDFs in Japanese is a very basic task, so
struggling with this is not impressive.

It's much better now, but in the past, We often encountered problems
specific to the Japanese environment in GNU/Linux.

In light of this, it is usually best to use a distribution with many
Japanese users.

If they are using Guix and run into such problems, they will think, "I
knew it".

I want more Japanese users to use this wonderful Guix, but I think it
would be a shame if these experiences affect them and they leave.

The above is my opinion as a Japanese, but other non-Latin script users
may have the same opinion.

Thanks