fonts post script recipes complete?

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mardi 09 janvier 2007 à 22:05 +0100, Patrice Dumas a écrit :
> On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 09:33:21PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > 
> > The scripts you ask for are not "missing" from Fedora guidelines, not
> > including them was a deliberate decision (as early as early fedora.us
> > era IIRC).
> 
> That's ridiculous. Hiding some usefull information is not helpful. 

It was not useful, what was useful was to stop registering new fonts in
the legacy core font system and contain the problem.

> It 
> would be much wiser to give advice on how to chose which font to include 
> or not,

My advice is: unless your font provides a radically distinctive new
style, has a reasonable encoding coverage (ASCII + € patched in does not
cut it nowadays), and a dedicated design team available to fix the bugs
people *will* find in it, just don't do it.

The only exception are fonts providing glyph coverage not included in
current Fedora fonts, and that only if it's not possible to get it added
to existing fonts in a reasonable time¹.

Finding new fonts is easy. Finding good fonts is way harder.

> and how to avoid messing with other apps, and give all the 
> useful scriptlets - with warnings about the associated fonts, of course.

If people knew all this the core font system would not have been dropped
like a hot potato by the developers of all major FLOSS GUI apps². The
basic truth is no one ever managed to get it working safely without side
effects for a reasonably wide range of in-the-wild fonts, differing
resolutions, locales & apps.

¹ This applies only to fonts exposed through fontconfig — apps that
insist in using last millenium's font subsystem can live with the core
fonts Fedora provided last millenium too

² at core emacs is not a GUI app

PS
I'm generally considered as a dangerous font cowboy by the people @rh
who actually have to support users with broken font setups. It's ironic
I'm on the caution side for once.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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