Hi Nicolas,
Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
Le vendredi 25 mai 2007 à 13:38 -0400, Matthias Clasen a écrit :
On Fri, 2007-05-25 at 17:09 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
FYI the liberation fonts are nice and it's certainly worth showcasing
them but they're not Fedora 7 default fonts, since they lack extended
glyph coverage and lack hinting.
Yes, so what ?
So using them systematically is not reflecting the project state
accurately, and it will hurt the local Fedora groups when they try to
localise Fedora marketing material and discover their language is just
not supported.
I hope it will help to give the reasons why I chose it. I will most
certainly switch it to DejaVu Sans, which will have better i18n support,
right? I honestly didn't realize Liberation Sans had a coverage problem;
I didn't try any non-basic English glyphs with it so that's my bad.
(As an aside, how is URW U001 [1] in terms of glyph coverage? Is that
another option?)
Anyhow, I'm hoping this is already understood, but here was my rationale
in using Liberation Sans:
Currently the Fedora font that was used for titling on the FC5 and FC6
CD/DVD covers is called Bryant2. It's a non-free font, it actually costs
at least a couple hundred dollars to get a license for it which highly
annoys me. I only last week got a license for it.
I could have used DejaVu Sans, but to be honest I'm really sick of Deja
Vu's look since it's one of the only good free & open fonts out there
and I've seriously used it to death! :) Liberation Sans is new, it's got
a fresh look, and it's open and free. I didn't choose it bc I work for
RH and I didn't mean to imply that the font had any kind of connection
with Fedora, just that it was far more readily available and easy to use
than Bryant2 has been in the past and it's a nice fresh look.
Liberation Sans in terms of licensing is definitely better than Bryant2,
but if it is limiting to folks internationally then I agree it is a poor
choice and I apologize.
Are you going to bring this up every time somebody
mentions Liberation ?
Please. I wrote nice things about the font, and only stated the plain
truth. And since you insist I'll add this.
Red Hat made a donation. A great one. You're entitled as a Red Hat
employee to be proud of your company.
But how does it reflect on Fedora? Not at all. At no stage was the
Fedora community involved in Liberation. You want info on it you'd
better be a journalist and call Red Hat press contacts because you sure
won't get any by asking on community lists. The official Liberation page
accurately reflect this fact with its Red Hat branding and lack of any
fedoraproject.org link or contact.
I do some stuff for the Fedora community. I'm happy to see Red Hat
Fedora members cheer about some good action their company did. I'm less
happy, more accurately I'm deeply uncomfortable with the way
non-technical Fedora groups are incited to make Liberation a Fedora
emblem.
How are non-technical Fedora groups making Liberation a Fedora emblem?
Is this what you thought my intent was (it totally wasn't)? :( If not
where is this happening?
If I see a new, nice-looking open font I get excited and start using it
everywhere. The currently-mandated Fedora font is a $$$ closed one. Over
time when developing Fedora materials I've used Bitstream Vera & DejaVu
but I was simply excited about having some new options.
You're supposed to be proud of your emblems. But how can I be proud of
Liberation? It happened and still happens outside Fedora¹. It's not even
the result of some other community work, but was bought from a
professional closed-fonts foundry². What's the relationship of
Liberation with the Fedora community work I value? None that I can
easily see.
But Bitstream is a professional foundry that has closed fonts as well,
no? Fonts are really hard to do. It necessitates a lot of time (usually
years for good coverage) and effort. I'd like to see the art team grow
stronger at some more basic design tasks a bit more gradually than
trying to take on creating a whole font (a task for which I'll also
mention there hasn't been much interest anyone has expressed in this
group.)
We are *always* in need of new open fonts though. I agree that the
creation of Liberation wasn't done in the Fedora community. But was the
creation of Bitstream Vera, the intial set of glyphs that later became
DejaVu, also something done in the Fedora community or any FOSS
community? Or did Bitstream do the work and then license it openly?
(It's a real question, I actually honestly don't know; I was pretty sure
the latter was the case though.)
~m
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