Hi, Nicolas Spalinger wrote: > Well, it you look at upstream descriptions there is an intended > difference of usage between the OTF and the TTF.
Yep. > One being specific to another OS' rendering environment. Do we > really need both debianized? Well, as far as I read it one is optimized for DTP usage and the other one for GUI usage, so I expect both variants to be useful. > And I agree with Christian that we want to follow a general naming > convention for the fonts packages we maintain in the archive. > > Although it was decided a while ago that a big renaming/split was not > essential for now, given our team resources. Ok, so this has been discussed already. > We have some ttf-$foundry-$fontfamilyname containing OTF files at > this stage and it's not the end of the world IMHO. We can deal with > that someday. (other distros have renamed to > fonts-$foundry-$fontfamilyname for example). fonts-$foundry-$fontfamilyname sounds way more sane to me for source packages, yes. I'm glad to see that topic on the todo list, I though wonder why newly packaged stuff should not start using what is planned. Or is just planned to change it, but not yet decided how to change it? > > Anyway, back to this RFP: I saw font packages in the archive which had > > only the TTF files in the source package while I also saw packages > > like ttf-freefont, which do have SFD files as "source" for the TTF and > > OTF files. > > > > Then again, there are fonts under CC licenses (which seems fine for > > TTF files as they are "art" similar to images or texts) as well as > > GPL'ed fonts (where I'd expect to be able to get the SFD "source"). > > > > Does Debian make any difference between those two types of "free" > > fonts? > > You seem to be missing some facts about fonts and font design in your > analysis, please allow me to try and explain: I do. So thanks for your time to explain them. :-) > - various open fonts we have in the archive are created with a buildpath > we can't fully reproduce with unrestricted tools at this stage. Or that > we can't fully rebuild to reach the same quality and feature parity than > the upstream release. The thing is that if a maintainer recreates a > different buildpath from the upstream author then they are effectively > committing to maintain a derivative version. But the final TTF or OTF is > both object and source as you can open them in fontforge, make > modifications and create a derivative. So even if the upstream release > only contains a set of final TTF files, it is already source you can use > to a certain extent. Yeah, quite unique I know but fonts are a special > kind of software. You can always export the ttf to text-based source > formats and work from that too: sfd, ufo, ttx. Ok, didn't knew that indeed. Good to know and glad to hear.. > We're working to advocate the release of more extended sources > (smart font code, hinting, glyph and attachment point databases, > scripts, etc) to designers and working on extending the open font > design toolkit. It would be a pity (rather silly really) to discard > all the usable, distributable, modifiable, redistributable fonts you > have managed to get released under appropriate licenses over the > past few years because not all designers are using fontforge on > Debian as their preferred design environment. Sure. I was just wondering why a TTF without it's source is still free software. You explained that well. > - Fonts are software I wasn't really aware of that. I basically saw them like some vector or pixel graphic image... > and CC licenses are for assets (content, documents, music, images) > and Creative Commons strongly discourages using a CC combination for > Software Yep. That's well known for me. I just applied it to fonts the other way round because I saw fonts more like assets than software. > Using CC licenses for fonts is a bug and something Debian should > discourage. Oh, even that bad? > Kaffeesatz's relicensing is good news in that regard. Yeah, I figured that when reading http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=OFL#3b878279 And just now I noticed that you are one of the authors of that license. Thanks for that license! > - many GPL-ed fonts are still very fuzzy about what is the preferred > form for modification and have been created outside a reproducible > buildpath. What is their source? How can people properly satisfy the > source requirements of the GPL in a font context? Can they really make > use of it? That's basically the question I wondered about. > (there is also the issue of how the GPL interacts with font > embedding). Urgs. > - also "free fonts" is a very misleading expression as in the design > community it is always associated with dubious > maybe-redistribute-but-don't-modify-fonts, IOW freeware (often ripoffs). > Check your preferred search engine. We talk about libre/open fonts > instead to indicate the big difference between these fonts with a bad > reputation and fonts which their authors want to be usable, > distributable, modifiable, redistributable i.e. DFSG-compliant. We don't > want anyone to confuse the two! And well there's always the issue of > "free" being misunderstood as "this don't cost any money" but "free > font" as a fixed expression lead to even more misunderstandings and > should really be avoided. Short said: the common problem with the multiple meanings of the word "free". > Hope that helps, It did indeed, thanks a lot! > Thank you for your efforts around font packaging. You're always welcome > to join our team and help out :-) Not sure if I'll go that far and join the team, but at least I sponsored already some font packages. :-) Regards, Axel -- ,''`. | Axel Beckert <a...@debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/ : :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin `. `' | 1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486 202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE `- | 4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329 6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-wnpp-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100909010736.ge12...@sym.noone.org
