Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
I'd like know what people think of setting up a font SIG
I think it is a great idea!
3. I don't believe our font selection is optimal for every locale. It took a near-revolt by our Greek users to get their situation fixed in Fedora Core 6, and there are probably many other problem locales, where users just pass on Fedora or bear their pain silently instead of telling us about problems.
True.
4. The i18n team is nominally in charge of selecting the best fonts for each locale, but does not always have the right local contacts to do so. So far i18n has focused on technical problems : if your locale needs complex IM methods you have i18n visibility, if your locale poses no technical challenge but your default fonts are suboptimal the i18n team may not notice you.
Right and we are currently working hard moving all the fonts in our generic fonts-* to separate packages with their upstream names.
I believe there is enough interest in the various Fedora groups to improve the current situation through a font SIG.
Yes.
This SIG would be tasked with: A. providing a single point of entry for Fedora people interested in fonts, centralizing all our packaging rules or at least indexing them in a single place B. completing the existing font packaging documentation C. helping the i18n team maintain the font install list for each locale D. identifying fonts worthy of packaging for l10n or art reasons E. identifying problems in existing font packages and helping relay the info upstream F. identifying problems in our font infrastructure, packaging necessary font tools G. coordinating and effectively packaging new fonts
Looks good to me.
The l10n and i18n groups are naturals for (C). We just have to steal the Debian receipe of having a font-by-locale table in our wiki.
Yes
Note that doing the legal analysis of a potential font is far from easy as font licensing practices are far less clean than software licensing practices. Also we should try to build font from sources whenever possible, but font building is often a mess.
That is right - the legal side is more often harder than the packaging and reviewing.
G will demand packagers and reviewers. By nature most of them will be active in other Fedora forums, so we're not talking of a few full-time SIG members but a lot of part-time contributors.
Right, I guess this will be the main visible fruit of the SIG's efforts, which will provide good font packaging standards, guidelines and examples as you say.
I created a mockup wiki page to try to make all this clear http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NicolasMailhot/FontMatrix
Cool
So, who wants to play? Is Fedora ready for a font SIG or should I ask again next year?
I'm in. :) I think we need this sonner rather than later. Probably a bit late to make an impact on F8 but certainly we can start preparing now for F9.
Thanks for the initiative! Jens -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
