Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
Le Jeu 10 mai 2007 00:34, Rahul Sundaram a écrit :
Hi
Hi Rahul,
The initial font sets include Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters and
lacks hinting. The next update is planned to have hinting and support
for other locales.
This calls for many questions:
[I am not involved with this effort in any intimate level nor am I
anyway an expert in font technology. The contact point for more details
is Red Hat counsel, Mark Webbink who has been driving this effort. He is
pretty busy so getting official answers is going to take sometime. I
will answer these to my best of my knowledge. If you want further
clarifications I would have to get back to him]
1. Is this a long-term Red Hat project or will it go stagnant after
initial funding dries out ? (Luxi and Vera-like)
There is alteast a second update planned as the link says.
2. Does Red Hat intend to morph it in a community project (with the
usual wiki+bugzilla+open SCM infrastructure) or will contributions be
restricted to the contracted foundry (ie will it need a fork like Vera
before joining community space ?)
Whether we can get community contributors depending on the contractual
obligations between Red Hat and the font vendor doing the work. If a
fork is necessary we can setup a community space in Fedora at
hosted.fedoraproject.org and drive that.
3. what is the reasonning between the licensing choice? Most recent
FLOSS font projects seem to be gravitation towards OFL, and licensing
differences make cross-pollination difficult
GPL+ Fonts exception might be compatible with other font licenses. I
haven't looked yet. Not sure why this license was chosen.
4. will unicode coverage ever extend past Latin, Greek and Cyrillic ?
Is Latin, Greek and Cyrillic support limited to most common glyphs or
does it also includes regional variants (welsh, catalan, coptic, etc)
I heard there is going to more locale support again based on regions Red
Hat has customers asking for this.
5. is it intended to be the new RHEL or Fedora default font set or
just a windows compatibility pack ?
Compatibility atleast for RHEL. Language coverage is not enough for it
be the default set. We can make our own decisions in Fedora.
6. why did Red Hat choose to launch a new font project instead of
improving one of the existing FLOSS fonts? Was metric compatibility
the main reason? If so is it not dangerous to target the windows
2000/XP font set when vista just introduced a new default font set ?
Metric compatibility is the main requirement here. There are a inanely
large of documents that are using these fonts and without metric
compatibility these documents lose formating. A number of customers
can't afford that disruption and that is driving the choices here.
Hopefully we can them off this practice before the new vista default set
in Windows gets popular.
7. why is this discussed on the marketing list first ?
I thought it was pretty important change and Fedora folks should be
aware of it. I think this is more or less suitable for this list. That's
all. Not doing it representing the project or in any official capacity.
Rahul
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