Andreas wrote:
Hi,
first I would like to point out that I am totally open for a
discussion
about this. IMO bugzilla is just not the right place for it.
Thanks, that's great.
Chris wrote:
Well, no they don't. They are requesting the font Microsoft
calls
Tahoma, not a Wine-provided imitation of Tahoma.
I didn't know that wine-provided Tahoma is not exactly the same as Microsoft Tahoma. I
just knew it looked horrible. That is an important information, thank you. From now on
I'll write "wine-Tahoma" when talking about wine-provided Tahoma to make it
clear.
Chris wrote:
Providing a font called Tahoma that isn't Tahoma is a bad idea.
In
general, the fonts that are designed to copy other fonts get a different
name. In many cases, this is required because some font names are
trademarked (IIRC Helvetica is an example).
Wine should not call their font Tahoma. They should call it something
else and then map requests for Tahoma to their imitation font.
Is someone knowledgeable enough to put all the details and information together and open a
ticket in wine bug-tracker? I can do it, but since I know nothing about fonts, my bug
description might not explain the issue properly.
Felix wrote:
It happens because:
1-Microsoft's TTF fonts are not in the browser's font path
2-a poor imitation of Tahoma named Tahoma is in the browser's font
path
3-Clueless web authors include Tahoma as a fallback to Verdana, which
is not
part of a standard Wine install, while the Tahoma impostor is
This is a nice summary. Now, are we able to circumvent other people's mistakes and
obstacles?
I have to stress out one very important thing in case someone missed it: It is extremely
easy to make a font available only to wine itself, it has a special directory for that. No
other applications would see it.
Andreas wrote:
As a packager I, however, find it important that for the
use-case of wine the best available user experience is provided.
Hence
this font needs to be included an pulled in by wine like it is
today.
Let's assume we have moved wine-Tahoma to wine-specific font directory:
1. Wine users experience stays the same - all wine applications are still rendered
correctly
2. General users experience improves - web browser doesn't display a lot of favorite
web pages (like Facebook) with an ugly-looking font
Now, what is wrong about that?
Andreas, if there are packaging guidelines that would be broken, I'm sure we can
receive an exception. I can find out the correct approach and I will gladly help you
discuss that with relevant people.
If you are afraid there might be people out there who want wine-Tahoma as a system font,
it is important to realize that those people are probably just a tiny fraction of the
other side of the argument (users who prefer good-looking websites) and we can easily
adjust the README to explain how to make the font user-wide or system-wide if required
(together with a note that this is *not* Microsoft Tahoma and final appearance will
differ).
Or is there any other reason why you feel reluctant to make wine-Tahoma available only to
wine by default?
Thanks.