[LONG] State of the Fedora Fonts SIG

Mon Mar 17 16:01:11 UTC 2008

Hopefully this is not a completely uninformed suggestion, but I have
been culling fonts that are licensed as "free" from dafont.com for a
year and a half now, and I always add them to my Fedora install....and
I'm wondering if it would be worth me investigating with the makers of
some of these fonts as to whether they would care to have these fonts
included in a LInux distro.

I would be happy to contact the font designers with the idea, if the
Art team has the desire and/or power to include some of these fonts
with the distribution.

- klaatu

2008/3/16 Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>:
> Hi all,
>
>  Since it's Fedora 9 feature freeze/beta release time, I thought it would
>  be good to take a look at what happened during the Fedora 8 cycle on the
>  fonts front and make an advancement summary. This is mostly the same
>  thing as in the release notes but much more detailed and contributor,
>  not user oriented.
>
>
>  A. Infrastructure/background work
>
>  1. a Fonts SIG was created, with the associated infrastructure
>    wiki : http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts
>    mailing lists : http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts#ML
>
>  2. Font packaging documentation was written,reviewed and approved by FPC
>  and FESCO
>    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Packaging/Policy
>    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Packaging/SpecTemplate
>    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Packaging/Fontconfig
>  (the fonts spec template was added to rpmdevtools and will be available
>  whenever a new rpmdevtools release is made hint hint)
>
>  3. Legal rules for fonts within Fedora were clarified,
>    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Legal#licenses
>
>  4. A long list of potential packageable floss fonts was written
>    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Triaging/Pipeline#Wishes
>     (Given the usual font licensing mess, that's no small feat, many
>  thanks to Máirín Duffy who contributed most of it)
>
>  5. Work is under way to identify upstream font-related problems that
>  affect Fedora, in the hope Fedora developers can contribute to their
>  fixing, and Fedora users can comment in the upstream issues trackers and
>  make them a priority upstream
>    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/QA#known-problems
>
>
>  B. Distribution changes
>
>  1. As a result of the licensing rules clarification, some historic
>  RHL/Fedora fonts were dropped (Luxy, Syriac fonts, etc)
>  http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/devel/xorg-x11-fonts/xorg-x11-fonts.spec?rev=1.27&view=log
>
>  Hunky was dropped from the release for lack of userbase (early Bitstream
>  Vera derivative, since then completely deprecated in favour of DejaVu)
>
>  2. New font tools (xgridfit…) were packaged, others (fontforge) updated
>
>  3. New fonts were packaged
>    Greek Font Society fonts (13 fonts, Greek and Latin support)
>    Stix (math and engineering symbols)
>    Tiresias (low-vision latin fonts)
>    Samyak and Sarai fonts (indic support)
>    Thaifonts-scalable (Thai support)
>    The WenQuanYi Zen Hei (Chinese sans-serif font)
>    Inconsolata (monospace font)
>    Silkscreen, Yanone Kaffeesatz (art fonts)
>    efont (bitmap terminal font)
>
>  4. Efforts were expended to classify fonts in comps a bit better
>    http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/comps/comps-f9.xml.in
>
>  5. The two main distribution fonts, DejaVu and Liberation were updated
>  to new versions increasing unicode coverage. DejaVu replaced DejaVu LGC
>  as default font set at the beginning of the Fedora 9 cycle. Since I know
>  this is all very nebulous, here are some numbers
>
>    Fedora 8 sans-serif default fonts at release time:
>       DejaVu LGC Sans: 3768 glyphs (2.19)
>       Liberation Sans:  668 glyphs (0.2)
>       DejaVu Sans:     4959 glyphs (2.20)
>       (would prempt the two others, but not installed by default)
>
>   Current Fedora devel ans-serif default fonts:
>       DejaVu Sans:     5270 glyphs (2.24)
>       Liberation Sans:  668 glyphs (1.0, many fixes in the 0.2 glyphs)
>
>
>  C. What remains to be done (short-term)
>
>  1. Package more fonts.
>
>    We now have a font packager-friendly environment. With clear
>  packaging guidelines and a huge font wishlist, packaging work now mostly
>  consists in contacting upstreams to make them release files in
>  packageable state (with license, versions, etc) and filling in the
>  standard font spec template.
>
>    Thus we mainly need motivated packagers. The work is not hard, if
>  time consuming, and there's no way the current team can do it all by
>  itself. Spreading the load would help a lot.
>
>  2. Get bugs fixed upstream
>
>   Unfortunately Linux problems are somewhat low on the radar or projects
>  like Firefox and Mozilla, and problems of Linux users that didn't copy
>  Windows fonts even lower. We need more people to comment/vote on the
>  issues referenced in 
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/QA#known-problems
>
>  I could write a lot more, but this is long enough so it will have to do.
>  Do not hesitate to send comments or ask questions on on the SIG list.
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts#ML
>
>  Regards,
>
>  --
>  Nicolas Mailhot
>
> _______________________________________________
>  Fedora-art-list mailing list
>  Fedora-art-list at redhat.com
>  http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-art-list
>
>

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