[Bug 477445] [python-matplotlib] Please convert to new font packaging guidelines

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=477445





--- Comment #10 from Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>  2009-07-07 10:20:37 EDT ---
(In reply to comment #9)
> Unfortunately now Matplotlib doesn't work properly with STIX fonts (as included
> in the upstream matplotlib package for scientific graphs) since the Fedora
> supplied ones are in OpenType format rather than TTF (as supplied by
> Matplotlib).

Stix upstream is OpenType CFF only. They've promised to look at OpenType TT in
the next version, but who knows when it will be released. So our Stix font
packages are unlikely to include OpenType TT any time soon (and even if Stix
finaly releases OpenType TT versions I don't think we really want to package
two versions of the same fonts, they are huge and that only encourages app
authors not to fix their font support. CTAN made the mistake of encouraging the
packaging of fonts in multiple formats and as a result is stuck with all of
them since now people got used not having to support newer formats).

In the very short term the matplotlib maintainer will probably have to package
the built-in Stix TTFs as proper matplotlib font subpackages. But do remember
this is not a sustainable workaround since it has the exact same drawbacks as
private libs and we'll ask to kill them in later Fedora releases.

> Matplotlib is unable to do font subsetting on OTF fonts 

Well, that's a big matplotlib issue, OpenType CFF is one of the three major
modern font formats (with OpenType TT and Apple AAT, but rumors are Apple is
realising it can't sustain AAT alone when everyone else chose OpenType), and
it's the default in many font creation tools, so it will become more and more
common.

Please work with upstream so they fix their font backend (or switch to modern
font libs such as fontconfig/cairo/poppler that can handle modern fonts)

> and it's fallback
> option of including the whole font doesn't appear to work (the resulting PDF
> doesn't have any text...).  

That's strange since Opentype CFF is Adobe's child as PDF, so it's probably the
most PDF-friendly modern font format. But Stix does all kinds of unusual and
complex things. It's not a simple font set (all the more reason not to ship
different variants that will have subtle conversion problems)

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