https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1753295
--- Comment #53 from Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot(a)laposte.net> ---
Jan, the maintainers need to convert their files, working with upstream.
The decision to move to Harfbuzz and OpenType was taken in 2006.
(and Harfbuzz is named after OpenType so its reliance on OpenType is not
exactly new or hidden
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/HarfBuzz/)
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/TextLayout/
fonttosfnt was provided at the same date to help bitmap font maintainers
migrate (2005)
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/fonttosfnt/commits/master/COPYING
The Fedora font packaging guidelines marked non-OpenType formats as legacy and
deprecated around the same date (IIRC in 2007, the history on
https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=Packaging:FontsPolicy&act...
states it was imported from the previous wiki in 2008)
Notice how the dates match? It was all done in coordination by the people
working on fonts and text problems on Fedora and Free desktops in general.
By and large people interested in bitmap fonts chose to ignore all this till
the 2006 process reached its final stages and things started breaking hard. And
now they’re between a rock and a hard place.
There was a *long* window of time to convert font files, proof the result, fix
fonttosfnt if necessary, etc (and in that time all major upstream apps, from
Libre Office to GNOME to KDE to TEX engines to browsers to openjdk, made the
hard work of converting their codebase to OpenType).
That the 13 years of migration time were wasted bitmap side won’t pull the
clock back. Compressing 13 years of migration work in a few months because time
is up is no one’s preferred outcome.
So, do we regret this situation? Yes we all regret this situation. Do we
understand it is painful? Yes we all understand it is painful. But, time is
really up now.
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