Preamble -------- The maintenance of fonts, at least TTF fonts, is currently splitted out among many maintainers in the project, while the problems faced by TTF font package maintainers are nearly always the same.
From my own recent experience of helping/sponsoring/taking over a few font packages, I have concluded that some coordination between font packages maintainers could be an interesting improvement for the project. So, I hereby propose to think about a possible TTF fonts packaging team. Project goals ------------- The first goal for this team would be setting up a font packaging policy. Font packages are usually very simple packages, but having a common packaging style would greatly help incorporating new fonts in Debian. Usually, people who request the packaging of fonts are not often very experienced people and that would help smoothing this learning curve. Having a common maintenance team would also optimize the usage of "resources", namely font experts, who are not that common. My personal vision of this is having the font maintenance team slowly becoming the maintainer of more and more ttf-* font packages, with the agreement of the original maintainers, of course. Those would then remain as "main maintainer" by being listed in the font "Uploaders" field. The team could also seek for more fonts to be included in Debian, possibly after setting up some prerequisites to avoid too crappy fonts. The project could also include the maintenance of font-related tools, such as fontforge or defoma (which seems mostly abandoned, but probably requires solid knowledge or Perl and cryptic programming...:-)). Project resources ----------------- For this, I imagine setting up a maintenance team, with common resources: - a dedicated project on Alioth, with a common SVN repository - a mailing list hosted on lists.debian.org Then, I propose contacting the ttf-* font packages maintainers and propose them to join the team, explaining that this is a volunteer action anyway and they will remain as the "main" maintainer of their packages. Next steps ---------- The first step is trying to see whether this proposal receives interest, by my fellow Debian developers, as well as font packages maintainers (several of them not being yet a DD). So, please follow up in -devel to show interest, criticism, laughs and the like. I do not intend to keep the "lead" of this very long, mostly because I'm not really a font expert. But, at least until a strong team emerges, I can give some time in coordinating the whole stuff and slowly gather the current font packages maintainers. I have voluntarily limited the scope of the project to TTF fonts, which become more an more popular. This is mostly by ignorance and because of my loose knowledge of other font systems. Feel free to propose a wider project (but not too much wide, also: having a first limited focus is probably more realistic). Please feel free to point me at existing projects I wouldn't be aware of (debian-desktop?) which cover similar goals... List of current ttf-* packages ------------------------------ (just looking at the packages descriptions give a good idea of the non-coordination of font packaging..:-))) ttf-arhangai - A TrueType font with Mongolian Cyrillic letters ttf-arphic-bsmi00lp - "AR PL Mingti2L Big5" Chinese TrueType font by Arphic Technology ttf-arphic-gbsn00lp - "AR PL SungtiL GB" Chinese TrueType font by Arphic Technology ttf-arphic-gkai00mp - "AR PL KaitiM GB" Chinese TrueType font by Arphic Technology ttf-baekmuk - Baekmuk series TrueType fonts ttf-dustin - Various TrueType fonts from dustismo.com ttf-f500 - Wipeout 3 Font ttf-isabella - The Isabella free TrueType font ttf-kochi-gothic - Kochi Subst Gothic Japanese TrueType font without naga10 ttf-kochi-mincho - Kochi Subst Mincho Japanese TrueType font without naga10 ttf-sazanami-gothic - Sazanami Gothic Japanese TrueType font ttf-sazanami-mincho - Sazanami Mincho Japanese TrueType font ttf-staypuft - The Stay-Puft free TrueType font ttf-summersby - Free TrueType typeface font ttf-thryomanes - A Unicode font covering Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and IPA ttf-tmuni - font for Tibetan, Dzongkha and Ladakhi (OpenType Unicode) ttf-uralic - Truetype fonts for Cyrillic-based Uralic languages ttf-kochi-gothic-naga10 - Kochi Subst Gothic Japanese TrueType font with naga10 (non-free) ttf-kochi-mincho-naga10 - Kochi Subst Mincho Japanese TrueType font with naga10 (non-free) ttf-mikachan - handwritten Japanese Truetype font libfont-ttf-perl - Perl module for TrueType font hacking libttf-dev - FreeType 1 development files (static library and headers) ttf-alee - A Lee's EunJin family Hangul truetype fonts ttf-arabeyes - Arabeyes GPL TrueType Arabic fonts ttf-arphic-bkai00mp - "AR PL KaitiM Big5" Chinese TrueType font by Arphic Technology ttf-arphic-ukai - "AR PL ZenKai Uni" Chinese Unicode TrueType font Kaiti style ttf-arphic-uming - "AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni" Chinese Unicode TrueType font Mingti style ttf-bengali-fonts - Free TrueType fonts for the Bengali language ttf-bitstream-vera - The Bitstream Vera family of free TrueType fonts ttf-bpg-georgian-fonts - BPG Georgian fonts ttf-dejavu - Bitstream Vera fonts with additional characters ttf-devanagari-fonts - Free TrueType fonts for languages using the Devanagari script ttf-farsiweb - FarsiWeb free TrueType Farsi fonts ttf-freefont - Freefont Serif, Sans and Mono Truetype fonts ttf-gujarati-fonts - Free TrueType fonts for the Gujarati language ttf-indic-fonts - Metapackage for free Indian language fonts ttf-junicode - a Unicode font for medievalists (Latin, IPA and Runic) ttf-kacst - KACST free TrueType Arabic fonts ttf-kannada-fonts - Free TrueType fonts for the Kannada language ttf-khmeros - KhmerOS Unicode fonts for the Khmer language of Cambodia ttf-malayalam-fonts - Free TrueType fonts for the Malayalam language ttf-mgopen - Magenta Open Truetype fonts ttf-mph-2b-damase - font with ranges from the latest version of unicode ttf-opensymbol - The OpenSymbol TrueType font ttf-oriya-fonts - Free TrueType fonts for the Oriya language ttf-paktype - PakType free OpenType Urdu fonts ttf-punjabi-fonts - Free TrueType fonts for the Punjabi language ttf-tamil-fonts - Free TrueType fonts for the Tamil language ttf-telugu-fonts - Free TrueType fonts for the Telugu language ttf-unfonts - Un series Korean TrueType fonts ttf-gentium - Gentium TrueType font ttf-larabie-deco - Decorative fonts from www.larabiefonts.com ttf-larabie-straight - Straight fonts from www.larabiefonts.com ttf-larabie-uncommon - Special decorative fonts from www.larabiefonts.com ttf-xfree86-nonfree - non-free TrueType fonts from XFree86 ttf-xfree86-nonfree-syriac - non-free syriac OpenType fonts from XFree86 --
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