Hi Nathan, On Sun, Jan 29, 2023 at 12:46:46PM +0000, Nathan Willis wrote: > Please don't take the following info as stop-energy (which it's not), but > there > is already an active project doing the task of liberating the no-longer-free > symbols from Font Awesome, called ForkAwesome: > https://github.com/ForkAwesome/Fork-Awesome ... which has also added a fair > number of new glyphs since it was founded (6+ years ago).
We have switched to ForkAwesome for (python3-)qtawesome following the bug report about FontAwesome not being free. Unfortunately, it has not had a commit since December 2021 and no new icons since September 2021. It has many, many fewer icons than FontAwesome, and in many cases cannot be used as a replacement for it. My proposal is *not* to create fonts which mimic FontAwesome. The only issue for Debian (as evidenced by the discussion in this bug report) is that the fonts cannot be recreated from the SVG files. The license that upstream have used on their fonts and SVG files is generously open, and their only (public) reason for not sharing their build process publicly is that their commercial offerings use the same infrastructure. Therefore the only thing that I am proposing is writing an open-source build structure for recreating the FontAwesome webfonts from the SVG sources. As most of the work has already been done by other people, this should be relatively straightforward, and will be able to keep up-to-date with upstream's font offerings. The resulting webfonts should be drop-in replacements for the upstream versions, offering exactly the same icons. I hope that makes a little more sense. Best wishes, Julian
