Some feedback on your PT Sans fonts

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Dear sir,

Fist of all, I'd like to thank ParaType for releasing PT Sans for public
use. We've started distributing it as a default component in Fedora
Linux since Fedora 13: http://fedoraproject.org/ 
Depending on the feedback we receive it may find its way in derived
Linux distributions (OLPC, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Oracle
Enterprise Linux, etc).

I must say that your release of PT Sans under the OFL font license helps
a lot. The OFL is a licence we know and respect, and our legal people
are not happy about one-of-a-kind licences such as the PT Free Font
Licence you used at first.

Now, as part of Fedora's ongoing QA work, we run automated sanity tests
on all the font files shipped in the distribution. It is very important
that all our fonts, especially those installed by default, pass those
tests with minimal warnings. Our ability to collect font problems in the
field is limited (most users do not report the font problems they
experience) and we have to rely on automated testing.

Moreover we've found out that most foundries do not test for the same
problems as us. Therefore our testing usually complements nicely the one
performed by font authors, and makes it a free service to thank them for
releasing Free/Libre/Open fonts.

This testing found several problems in PT Sans. This is not surprising
for such a young font, but we'd be grateful if you could look at them
and confirm we made the right choice in selecting PT Sans as a default
font.

I've attached the full test logs to this mail. As a quick summary, we've
found three classes of problems:

      * Bad font metadata.
        PT Sans font naming does not respect Microsoft's WWS font naming
        guidelines. It is a big problem for us as Linux does not perform
        automated font name fixing like Windows Vista or Seven. We
        suggest the following naming change in your OpenType/WWS
        metadata fields:
                PT Sans Narrow, Bold → Pt Sans, SemiCondensed Bold
                    PTN77F.ttf	[paratype-pt-sans-fonts]
                PT Sans Narrow, Regular → Pt Sans, SemiCondensed
                    PTN57F.ttf	[paratype-pt-sans-fonts]
        See also:
        http://blogs.msdn.com/text/attachment/2249036.ashx
        
      * Various fontlint errors.
        Fontlint is the font testing suite created by the fontforge
        project.
                http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/fontlint.html
        Fedora, OpenOffice.org, and others, have been adding new tests
        to fontlint whenever a bad font broke an application on our
        platforms.
        (see attached logs)
        
      * Partial script coverage.
        We understand that creating a typeface that covers the whole
        Unicode range is an enormous amount of work and not something
        that can reasonably be asked of most font authors. Therefore our
        test limits itself to detecting almost-complete scripts, and
        only triggers when less than ten glyphs are necessary to
        complete one or more of them (very often it triggers on the few
        diacritics necessary to support  minority languages).
        Our test identifies areas where only a little more work can make
        the font files useful for many more people. Please use this
        opportunity to improve your fonts.
        (see fc-query results in attached logs, and the explanation in
        summary.txt)

I hope this feedback will be of some use to ParaType.

Best regards, 

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
Fedora fonts special interest group
http://fonts.fedoraproject.org/

<<attachment: paratype-pt-sans.zip>>

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