Heads up: Droid fonts update in Rawhide

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the quick answer!

> On 15 July 2012 21:42, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>
> wrote:
>> A. I used a few hundred MiBs of Android git checkout as source.
>
> That's the canonical source for Droid, yes.
>
> (The Roboto fonts in that repo has another canonical source,
> http://developer.android.com/design/style/typography.html)

Well that's one of the unhelpful Google web sites. Its zip informs you:

"You may use the materials in this file without restriction to develop
your apps and to use in your apps."

I haven't the faintest idea what that means legally. If I was mad enough
to package another set of Google fonts, I'd source Roboto from android git
like Droid, where it is clearly tagged with the Apache license.

>> its relationship with android as upstream is unclear
>
> They are separate projects and while formally have the same parent
> company, they may as well be different companies with no relationship
> beyond their libre license.

Nice clarification! (I suspected as much but the VCS histories were
unclear on when and why changes were propagated from one to the other)

>> 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.
>
> Please clarify 'dispatch' :-)

Kufi with Sans (masquerading as the Arabic block of Droid Sans) and Naskh
with Serif the same way (see the long fontconfig ruleset I referenced)

http://www.29arabicletters.com/foundry/?m=1-1-1&fid=26
states Naskh was designed to complement Serif

and
https://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=17382
that chromium uses Kufi with Sans

>> E. If the package description does not correctly attribute the main
>> designers involved, please educate me and I'll correct it.
>
> I'll see if I can find out more about this.

That would be appreciated. I only found descriptions for the new Arabic
fonts.

>> 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.
>
> The Fallback fonts have CJK glyphs and others character ranges not
> found in the other fonts. The Legacy one can probably be forgotten.

I should have indicated I kept DroidSansFallback (no idea if it's missing
something important compared to DroidSansFallbackFull and
DroidSansFallbackLegacy)

> The UI variants have adjusted vertical metrics to fit the Android UI's
> vertical space limitations.

Ok that means they can be ignored on a desktop.

Thanks for the useful information!

Best regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot