[Fwd: Droid fallback CJK and fontconfig?]

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Hi,

As you probably know Google has released a Droid font set as part of its
Android platform. While the font licensing is being clarified
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=472635
(Fedora packaging blocker) I've taken a quick look at the font files.

The set includes a huge "Droid Sans Fallback" font with CJK coverage.
Could the CJK folks take a look at it and tell me how this font should
be treated: as Japanese-only, Chinese-only, Korean-only before/after
current CJK defaults, etc? Han unification means someone will probably
not be happy about it.

I've uploaded preliminary droid packages there
http://nim.fedorapeople.org/fontpackages/

so people can check them out.

Regards,

[Qianqian Fang]

hi Nicolas

As we discussed last time, I've sent email asking for official confirmation
and clarifications of the license in the font metadata. I am now waiting
to hear back from them (message attached).

The Han glyphs in Droid fallback pretty much follow the Han-unification
as in the unicode documentations. That means they look very much close
to what Chinese mainland users preferred. The style is Heiti, which is like
ttf-wqy-zenhei and is essentially a sans-serif style. There are 16,502 Hanzi
in the CJK basic block, which is the union of GB2312 and Big5 charsets.
Because this font is targeted at memory-limited devices, there are
15,524 Han glyphs were composed by references, the rest are stand-alone
outline glyphs which can not be decomposed into components.
It contains no embedded bitmaps, but the outline quality is very good.
I believe most zh_* users will be very happy if this font will be used
as desktop font (the current zh_* font on Fedora is wqy-bitmapfont
which is also using the Han-unification forms). It may be a little bit
difficult for Japanese and Korean users though.

As this font does not provide the full coverage to all CJK glyphs,
in the mean time, I believe the current national standards and
regulations in mainland China prefer GBK (same as CJK unified ideographs),
or even GB18030 (CJK basic+CJK Ext. A) coverage, so, I've planned to extend
this font to at least GBK charset. That means to complete about 4500
glyphs. I and a friend are now working on an online tool to allow
people to compose new glyphs from existing Droid components.
It is almost working, you can browse the following link for a sample
output: (need to view with firefox 3.x)

http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?ViewGlyph#SFD/Droid/%E8%85%AA

the GUI is at http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?BezierGlyph
but it only has Chinese instructions so far.

Once the license is sorted out, we will start promoting this project
among the Chinese users, and make our way toward a more complete
CJK font with this extension. I also planned to look into the reference
glyphs and seek the possibility of further compression of the font.
Similar to the current ttf-wqy-zenhei settings, Chinese users will also be
happy to see a mono-spaced face co-existing with the regular face in
ttc form.

Qianqian

Joe Onorato wrote:
> Hi Qianqian,
>
> I'll follow up with the people responsible for fonts.
>
> -joe
>
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Qianqian Fang <[e-mail] 
> > wrote:
> hi Joe
>
> A few weeks ago, I posted a question on android-discussion group,
> asking about the droid font licenses:
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss/browse_thread/thread/3c60867cab66e23d/ab69c3174b63ca4c?lnk=gst&q=font#ab69c3174b63ca4c
> <http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss/browse_thread/thread/3c60867cab66e23d/ab69c3174b63ca4c?lnk=gst&q=font#ab69c3174b63ca4c>
>
> I really appreciate your feedback and confirmation on the license
> matter.
>
> As I am an maintainer for an open-source font project, I also
> maintain a few CJKV font packages for Fedora. Recently, I
> mentioned my plan of making derived fonts from Droid
> font family at fedora's font list, the people in charge appeared
> to be very careful, and warned me to obtain a more "official"
> clarification on the license before taking further actions. You
> can see our discussions at
>
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-fonts-list/2008-November/msg00009.html
>
> We both felt that the best way to make the clarifications is to state
> it in the metadata section of the font, there are dedicated
> "License Description"
> and "License Info URL" fields in the name table to specify the
> font licenses:
>
> http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/opentype/index_name.html
>
> I am wondering if it is possible for android team to update the font
> files and clarify the licenses. In this way, people's confusion on
> the fonts
> and the sdk package will completely go away.
>
> If you or your team member do have the plan to make this
> change, I would be appreciated if you can let me know when
> the updated fonts are pushed into svn, so I can mobilize my
> team to start planned works around these fonts.
>
> thank you so much for your time and looking forward to your reply.
>
> Qianqian

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As you probably know Google has released a Droid font set as part of its
> Android platform. While the font licensing is being clarified
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=472635
> (Fedora packaging blocker) I've taken a quick look at the font files.
>
> The set includes a huge "Droid Sans Fallback" font with CJK coverage.
> Could the CJK folks take a look at it and tell me how this font should
> be treated: as Japanese-only, Chinese-only, Korean-only before/after
> current CJK defaults, etc? Han unification means someone will probably
> not be happy about it.
>
> I've uploaded preliminary droid packages there
> http://nim.fedorapeople.org/fontpackages/
>
> so people can check them out.
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Fedora-i18n-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-i18n-list

[Qianqian Fang]

Just a few more words about default Chinese font settings.

There seem be a distinct dividing line among the Chinese
users for their font preferences: on one side of the line,
they really prefer sharp-looking bitmaped Chinese glyphs, while,
the other side have strong preference in the smooth-looking of
AA-ed vector rendering. The contradictions between these two
groups can be constantly felt in almost all Chinese Linux
forums.

Using Ubuntu as an example, when Ubuntu 8.04 set wqy-zenhei
as the default Chinese Sans font, it has the embedded bitmaps turned
on by default. There was a strong rally against using the
embedded bitmaps, because they like the vector form of
ZenHei. I have to put instructions on our front page to tell
people how to turn off the bitmaps. After a 400-participant
survey, somebody proved that vector-preferred users are about
3:1 to the bitmap ones 
http://forum.ubuntu.org.cn/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=120639   (in Chinese)
So, in 8.10, the bitmaps in ZenHei was turned off. Now,
the CN forum of ubuntu is flooded with complains of
losing their "sharp-looking glyphs", and asking how to turn
on the bitmaps. I had to make another sticky post at our website
to teach people how to turn it back on.

What I want to say is, these two groups both have significant
number of supporters. As the current settings on Fedora is
the bitmap way. I would anticipate some disturbance among
the users for the font style switching from one to the other
if we decide to use Droid(or derivatives) as the default.
Hope the font-selector tool can be released timely to help
sorting out the font preference chaos: 
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/font-selector

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As you probably know Google has released a Droid font set as part of its
> Android platform. While the font licensing is being clarified
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=472635
> (Fedora packaging blocker) I've taken a quick look at the font files.
>
> The set includes a huge "Droid Sans Fallback" font with CJK coverage.
> Could the CJK folks take a look at it and tell me how this font should
> be treated: as Japanese-only, Chinese-only, Korean-only before/after
> current CJK defaults, etc? Han unification means someone will probably
> not be happy about it.
>
> I've uploaded preliminary droid packages there
> http://nim.fedorapeople.org/fontpackages/
>
> so people can check them out.
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Fedora-i18n-list mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-i18n-list