How to change the fallback font for missing languages?

Question

The Arabic language in the new Ubuntu font is missing, so it has to fallback to the standard font, but the problem is that the standard font isn't good, and I want to replace it with Tahoma.

Is there a way to do that or it is built into the font itself?

Answer 1

<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font">
        <test name="lang" compare="contains">
                <string>ar</string>
        </test>
        <alias>
                <family>sans-serif</family>
                <prefer>
                        <family>Tahoma</family>
                </prefer>
        </alias>
</match>
</fontconfig>

Stick that in your ~/.fonts.conf and everything written in Arabic should use Tahoma.

Answer 2

I believe the "fallback font" is called Unifont. I'm not sure you can change the fallback font itself, but you can always change the default font to Tahoma.