Le vendredi 21 août 2009 à 14:46 +0200, Jindrich Novy a écrit : > Hi Nicolas, Hi Jindrich, Sorry for the late answer, I was offline for some time [CC-ing the fonts list, hopefully other people will complete this answer]. > I'm currently looking in a way how to package fonts in TeX Live so > that other uses takes benefit of them. I have read the > Packaging:FontsPolicy and have a few questions to you if you don't > mind. > > 1) which fonts particularly are appropriate to package? The most wanted and useful fonts are TrueType (OpenType TTF, .ttf) fonts, followed by OpenType (OpenType OTF, .otf) ones. .otf is probably the major font format of this decade, but OO.o does not support it properly yet (I see upstream closed the associated bugs those past days, but the support will probably make it to Fedora only for F13). For specific fonts the current wishlist is usually a good indicator of what people are interested in http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Font_wishlist The most wanted TEX font set is probably TEX Gyre, but also probably not suitable for Fedora inclusion right now (GUST derived some GPL fonts under its own license, refused to respect the GPL, then got URW to re-release the origin files under a different license, which ignores the modifications people had made under the GPL for years, and makes it all a huge mess. Unless you can confirm TEX Gyre is under the GPL, or under the new URW license, with the licensing of all intermediate contributions taken care of, it's best to stay clear of it). That being said we package fonts in every possible general-purpose (ie not metatype), the rationale being it's better to have them where Behdad can check them for bugs rather than having users add them manually and find bugs in the field. To avoid conflicts we try to package only one format for each font (the most recent/complete version) though TEX-related apps have been known to require the installation of several formats in parallel. In that case the different format should be cleanly separated in different subpackages so the average user does not have to install the megs of redundant data only specific users are interested in. Likewise, when a font consists of a mix of general-purpose TTF/OTF data, and specific TEX files, we try to separate them. Existing Kerkis packages are probably a good example of current best practice: – ctan-kerkis-calligraphic-fonts.noarch : Kerkis Calligraphic Type1 fonts — ctan-kerkis-sans-fonts.noarch : Kerkis sans Type1 fonts — ctan-kerkis-serif-fonts.noarch : Kerkis serif Type1 fonts — tex-kerkis.noarch: Kerkis Type1 fonts, TeX support files — ctan-kerkis-fonts-common.noarch : Kerkis Type 1 fonts, common files > 2) is the simple font packaging template enough for the TeX Live font > packaging? Unfortunately, no. I hoped years ago to package everything using it, but reality disagreed, that's why there are two templates now. Unfortunately (1), rpm dependencies can not express "this package contains A with features 1 2 3 and B with features 2 4 5". They can only say "this package contains A and 1 2 3". For the font auto-installer to work, features need to be clearly associated with a font family, and "this package contains A and B 1 2 3 4 5" is not usable. Our font packagers need to clearly separate each font family in its own (sub)package so there is not confusion between the features of different font families in the dependency solver. Unfortunately (2), differentiating font families is not trivial to automate either. For many years there were little order and conventions in the setting of the font family and font style fields. So many font creators used dangerous constructs such as [font family] [font style] [awesomebobfonts] [I rock rabbit regular] [awesomebobfonts] [baobab italic bold] when those two files obviously belong to different font families and should have been named [awesomebobfonts I rock rabbit] [regular] [bobfonts baobab] [italic bold] It got so bad that Microsoft now systematically starts by collating the font family and style declared by the font file and then uses heuristics to try to re-separate them sanely. http://blogs.msdn.com/text/attachment/2249036.ashx So nowadays we mostly triage font files manually, using the same rules as Microsoft to determine what is part of the same font family. Microsoft targets the CSS font model, which is IMHO a sane target to have. http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/typotechnica2007/Font%20names.pdf You have the exact rules in the Microsoft paper, they boil down to "a font family is a set of files that differ only by width, weight or slant". So for example "Bold" is an in-family attribute, but "Small Caps" or "Shadow" indicate a different font family. Also, since old font formats used many different files to support different encodings, we consider that font files that represent the same design over different encodings are all part of the same family. So to sum up we split font packages over font family lines, not encodings (as used to be done by xorg for example, but the tech moved the other way). The only exception are ttc files. Those can include different font families in a single file, and there's no sane way to separate then today. Since TEX is full of old files you'll probably find many fonts that do not respect the WWS model or are broken in some other way. Do not hesitate to report those upstream as part of the packaging. > 3) Is it ok to name the font foundry like texlive-accfonts? As you've seen we tend to name our packages [foundry]-[fontfamily]-fonts (or [foundry]-[fontfamily]-[format]-fonts when a font is packaged in multiple formats). When TEX is not the upstream of a font, it's probably better to package the upstream version outside TEX and make the TEX part depend on it (for example, the GFS fonts). For fonts released primarily within TEX, I guess any of tex- texlive- ctan- will do as foundry prefix. Current packages mostly use ctan-, but I the TEX community is better placed than me to decide what prefix is most appropriate. (I'd be best to codify it in a Fedora packaging guideline so the question is not asked again in a few months). However you also have the case of font authors that release some fonts within TEX and others elsewhere. (for example, ADF). In that case I suppose users will be happier to get them all under the same foundry prefix, and not some under texlive- and others under foundry-. So I guess the rule should be “use foundry as prefix when it's clearly identified, and a generic prefix like texlive- or ctan- otherwise”. PS. do use -fonts as postfix for font packages, not -font or fonts. I'm sorry about all the exceptions and manual rules — it just reflects the sorry lack of conventions in the libre font world right now. Hopefully more clean distro packaging will drain the swamp over time. > Good news are that TeX Live 2009 is now in question for Fedora so that > we could make benefit of the new fonts present there :) That's awesome news. I look forward to have something else to complain about in font packaging reports :p Best regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot
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