GNU Unifont update

[Qianqian Fang]

I think this will probably be interesting to the people in this list.

With the blessing from Roman Czyborra, the former maintainer of
GNU Unifont, Paul Hardy, a volunteer developer from CA, is now
officially maintaining this widely used dual-width bitmap font.
In the past couple months, Paul devoted tremendous of efforts
toward the goal of complete BMP coverage of Unifont. In the meantime,
we had extensive collaboration and ported all our latest creation of
Hanzi glyphs, including the Unicode 5.1 additions, from WenQuanYi's
fonts to GNU Unifont. Paul told me that he is very close to make a
release, perhaps a few thousands glyphs away from a complete BMP
font. His website and the latest fonts can be found from here:

http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html

It would be nice to see this extensively updated GNU Unifont
pushed through all branches for Fedora. I will keep you posted
or send Paul directly here to announce his release.

Qianqian

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Jeu 15 mai 2008 06:15, Qianqian Fang a écrit :

Hi,
> I think this will probably be interesting to the people in this list.
>
> With the blessing from Roman Czyborra, the former maintainer of
> GNU Unifont, Paul Hardy, a volunteer developer from CA, is now
> officially maintaining this widely used dual-width bitmap font.

...
> http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html
>
> It would be nice to see this extensively updated GNU Unifont
> pushed through all branches for Fedora. I will keep you posted
> or send Paul directly here to announce his release.

Does this mean the WQY fonts are deprecated now and should be replaced
with GNU unifont ? If that's the case you need to start a rename
procedure and modify the comps files of branches unifont will be
pushed to.

If that's not the case, and WQY and GNU Unifont fonts will exist in
parallel from now on, we need to find a packager for GNU unifont. I'd
say the current WQY packager is best placed to take unifont up :p

Regards,

[Qianqian Fang]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Does this mean the WQY fonts are deprecated now and should be replaced
> with GNU unifont ? If that's the case you need to start a rename
> procedure and modify the comps files of branches unifont will be
> pushed to.
>
> If that's not the case, and WQY and GNU Unifont fonts will exist in
> parallel from now on, we need to find a packager for GNU unifont. I'd
> say the current WQY packager is best placed to take unifont up :p

For now, maybe keeping both packages in parallel is the best.
The Latin part of GNU Unifont and WQY's Unibit have different
styles. Unibit uses "Fixed" as the Latin glyphs, combined with
the CJK characters, it gives a classical look. For example:

http://wenq.org/gallery/albums/userpics/10002/fedora_unibit.png
http://wenq.org/gallery/albums/userpics/10002/fedora_unibit_smth_full.png

This combination is still preferred by some Chinese users.

The maintaining expense for both packages is not that much though.
I would be glad to maintain GNU Unifont, or show Paul how to do that
if he wants. The spec files for both packages can be almost identical.

Unfortunately Freetype2 does not support HBF
(ftp://ftp.cuhk.hk/.1/chinese/ccic/software/info/HBF-1.1/Format.html )
otherwise, we can share common data blocks as separate files,
and make one dependent to the other.

Qianqian
> Regards,

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Dim 18 mai 2008 16:35, Qianqian Fang a écrit :
> For now, maybe keeping both packages in parallel is the best.

…
> The maintaining expense for both packages is not that much though.
> I would be glad to maintain GNU Unifont, or show Paul how to do that
> if he wants. The spec files for both packages can be almost identical.

That would probably best as I've still not found a motherlode of new
font packagers. Don't hesitate to ask on the list if you have any
problem!

Regards,

[Jens-Ulrik Petersen]

Hi Qianqian,

Sorry for the late reply.  Just saw this now...
> The maintaining expense for both packages is not that much though.
> I would be glad to maintain GNU Unifont, or show Paul how to do that
> if he wants. The spec files for both packages can be almost identical.

Do you still want to do this? :)
It would be nice to have Unifont in Fedora.

Jens

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Mer 2 juillet 2008 09:46, Jens Petersen a écrit :
> Hi Qianqian,
>
> Sorry for the late reply.  Just saw this now...
> > The maintaining expense for both packages is not that much though.
> > I would be glad to maintain GNU Unifont, or show Paul how to do that
> > if he wants. The spec files for both packages can be almost
> > identical.
>
> Do you still want to do this? :)
> It would be nice to have Unifont in Fedora.

Or more generaly to have more fonts in Fedora. It's been ages since
anyone but the usual suspects packaged a new font in Fedora (and a
fixed team does not scale)