Heads up: Droid fonts update in Rawhide
Hi,
I've just pushed new Droid font packages to Fedora Rawhide.
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=330644
Droid are complex font families with a difficult upstream and the
following caveats apply:
A. I used a few hundred MiBs of Android git checkout as source. The fonts
are also available in the Google font directory but it does not permit
convenient checkout (one either needs to collect download URLs
file-by-file, or perform a full-repository multi-gig mercurial checkout),
its relationship with android as upstream is unclear, and it has been
known to cut-down fonts to limit their weight when used in CSS files. As
for other web sites, they are generally more convenient, but their
upstream status is unclear, and they love to zap licensing terms to
“simplify” their users' lives (even in Google-sponsored sites). So I
concluded that what was good enough for Android was good enough for us.
B. The fonts follow Keith Packard's “one font per script” ideal but I
seriously question if fontconfig as it exists today is ready to process
such an ideal. Expect to hit bugs in fontconfig or in apps with
approximative fontconfig calls (the first generation of this package
triggered a Chromium bug; Android uses its own font and font fallback tech
so those fonts are not heavily tested in a fontconfig environment).
Fedora fontconfig files for Droid are available here:
http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=google-droid-fonts.git;a=tree
C. I tried to dispatch the Arabic variants in the Latin family they were
designed to complement, but I may have misunderstood the design info
available online.
D. Lots of new scripts here. i18n and l10n teams probably need to take a
look to decide it that changes font defaults for some locales, and if
compts changes are needed.
E. If the package description does not correctly attribute the main
designers involved, please educate me and I'll correct it.
F. I've zapped DroidSansFallbackFull DroidSansFallbackLegacy
DroidSansArabic DroidNaskh-Regular-SystemUI that seemed redundant. If they
provide something missing in the other files, please tell me what it is
and I'll fix the packages.
And that's all for this notification. Needless to say for this level of
changes those packages will only be available in F18 after F18 QA and
won't ever be pushed to previous Fedora versions.
Best regards,
--
Nicolas Mailhot