I have prepared Adobe’s Source Sans font. As I have never packaged a font before, I would appreciate any feedback before submitting it.
https://salsa.debian.org/fonts-team/fonts-adobe-source-sans
For anyone building with gbp, I would recommend taking a look at the following bug, which has been fixed upstream for the next release.
https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans/pull/272
Specifically, I have the following questions that someone with more font experience may be able to answer.
1. By default, Source Sans builds OpenType fonts, which is what I have currently packaged. However, it also has the option of converting these to the older TrueType format. Some of the advanced layout information is lost in the TrueType format. OpenType seems well supported by software that consumes fonts, and with only a few exceptions, I don’t see many Debian font packages shipping both OpenType and TrueType fonts. Is there any reason that I should ship the TrueType fonts in 2024 if upstream supports OpenType?
2. Upstream defaults to building standard OpenType fonts, but it has the option to build the VF (Variable Font) format, which combines several font binary files into one. I noticed that a few packages ship OpenType VF fonts, but none in the font directory that I easily discovered. I am assuming that, at least currently, there is no benefit to shipping the VF format in a font package in Debian.
After doing some research I decided to name the source package fonts-adobe-source-sans and the binary package fonts-adobe-source-sans-3. This is because upstream had indicated that the names of the actual fonts are expected to change to match the major version number of the release. Currently the version is 3.052, which is reflected in the binary font names:
SourceSans3-Regular.otf
If upstream ever updates to version 4 it is expected that the font names will change to match, but the source repository will will still be named source-sans.
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Soren Stoutner
soren@debian.org
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