Liberation fonts package.

[Debarshi Ray]

I just came across the announcement of the Liberation fonts
(https://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts/) at the Red Hat summit. Since I
did not notice any package for Fedora yet, I just rebuilt the RHEL5
SRPM on Rawhide.

Here are the SRPM, RPM, and rpmlint output respectively:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DebarshiRay?action=AttachFile&do=get&am...
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DebarshiRay?action=AttachFile&do=get&am...
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DebarshiRay?action=AttachFile&do=get&am...

Happy hacking,
Debarshi
-- 
GPG key ID: 63D4A5A7
Key server: pgp.mit.edu

[Nicolas Mailhot]

I'll just copy some points I've already made on the marketing list where
Liberation was announced:

>  The package needs work first:
>  - the spec does not follow our current rules (forces a fontconfig dep)
>  - it lacks any form of fontconfig setup, which is required if you want
>  the ms core font substitution to actually work
>  - the license file is not properly encoded and is dumped in the wrong
>  place
>  
>  Also:
>  - a lot of obvious questions are not answered on the web site or in
>  the package [1]
>  - the screen and print priority of the font was never discussed in
>  Fedora instances, which is not a problem for a minor font but is if
>  you want it to be one of the primary distro ones 
[1]

>  1. Is this a long-term Red Hat project or will it go stagnant after
>  initial funding dries out ? (Luxi and Vera-like)
>  
>  2. Does Red Hat intend to morph it in a community project (with the
>  usual wiki+bugzilla+open SCM infrastructure) or will contributions be
>  restricted to the contracted foundry (ie will it need a fork like Vera
>  before joining community space ?)
>  
>  3. what is the reasonning behind the licensing choice? Most recent
>  FLOSS font projects seem to be gravitation towards OFL, and licensing
>  differences make cross-pollination difficult
>  
>  4. will unicode coverage ever extend past Latin, Greek and Cyrillic ?
>  Is Latin, Greek and Cyrillic support limited to most common glyphs or
>  does it also includes regional variants (welsh, catalan, coptic, etc)
>  
>  5. is it intended to be the new RHEL or Fedora default font set or
>  just a windows compatibility pack ?
>  
>  6. why did Red Hat choose to launch a new font project instead of
>  improving one of the existing FLOSS fonts? Was metric compatibility
>  the main reason? If so is it not dangerous to target the windows
>  2000/XP font set when vista just introduced a new default font set ?
>   
7. who is supposed to field this kind of question?
8. who is supposed to push the package through the Fedora QA process?

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot

[Matthias Clasen]

On Fri, 2007-05-11 at 20:39 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

>  8. who is supposed to push the package through the Fedora QA process?
I'll file a package review request on Monday, or find somebody else 
who can do it.

[Matthias Clasen]

On Fri, 2007-05-11 at 20:39 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

>  8. who is supposed to push the package through the Fedora QA process?
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=239884

[Miles Lane]

I must say, while I appreciate the intent, these fonts do not have
good render hinting for Windows XP.  I will test them on Fedora 7 and
Ubuntu 7.04 later.

           Miles

[Rahul Sundaram]

Miles Lane wrote:
>  I must say, while I appreciate the intent, these fonts do not have
>  good render hinting for Windows XP.  I will test them on Fedora 7 and
>  Ubuntu 7.04 later. 
It wouldn't have good hinting anywhere. You might want to read the some 
information http://www.press.redhat.com/2007/05/09/liberation-fonts/

"The first release is a set of fully usable fonts, but they will lack 
the fully hinting capability (hinting adjusts font pixelization so that 
the fonts render with high quality at large and small sizes) provided by 
TrueType/FreeType technology. That release is now ready. The second 
release will provide full hinting of the fonts, and that release will be 
available by the end of the calendar year."

Rahul

[Kevin Kofler]

Rahul Sundaram <sundaram <at> fedoraproject.org> writes:
>  > I must say, while I appreciate the intent, these fonts do not
> have
>  > good render hinting for Windows XP.  I will test them on Fedora 7 and
>  > Ubuntu 7.04 later.
>  
>  It wouldn't have good hinting anywhere. You might want to read the some  
Fedora's freetype won't use the hinting information anyway for patent reasons. 
Instead, it uses Freetype's autohinter, which doesn't need any hinting 
information. Only non-Freetype systems or Freetype systems with the autohinter 
turned off will render unhinted fonts in a really ugly way.

        Kevin Kofler