Re: Considering packaging: Microsoft Web Font pack
On Mon, Dec 07, 1998 at 05:43:06AM -0500, Gregory Stark wrote:
> > Microsoft may remove these files from their web site at any time. In
> > particular, the win32 files are hard to pull apart, so we need the win16
> > ones. (I'm aware of the internationalization issue; if you can find a
> > way to split those win32 .exe files from Linux, let me know.)
>
> 1) so download them now onto master or somewhere until we figure out what to
> do with them.
I have them on my computer now.
> 2) at worst we can make an installer package, it can even fetch them from
> our ftp server.
True.
> 3) Have you tried using dosemu to extract the win32 archive? or wine?
> Though I would be afraid of an installer package that ran dosemu or wine
> during installation.
The win32 fonts are in a win32 executable -- it won't run in dosemu. The
latest Wine in Debian is mangled due to the libc6 __frame_whozit problem, or
at least it was a few days ago. I tried the Wine in hamm (from March '98),
and it got pretty far but blew up creating temp files. I wouldn't want to
force people to have X running in order to click "yes" on the license
agreement anyway...
Hey, does anyone know how to extract .sit.hqx files in Linux? I can de-hqx
them with mcvert but I'm stuck on the .sit file. The Mac fonts contain the
international characters...
> 4) How about a crazier idea: packaging IE to run under Wine. Last I
> checked the Win16 version actually ran ok. I think the license isn't
> quite as liberal as these font licenses though, but it might be
> possible with one of the clauses intended to allow ISPs to distribute
> customized versions of IE to their customers.
Interesting, but it doesn't really capture my interest (eg. I wouldn't
volunteer for it). I don't know a reason to use MSIE instead of Netscape
under Linux. The Truetype fonts, however, are immediately useful to me.
Incidentally, the "web font pack" contains the Trebuchet and Verdana fonts,
which REALLY ARE easier to read than Arial, especially at small font sizes.
I was rather impressed.
> > Secondly, it's orders of magnitude more convenient to let APT
> > download/install the fonts than to download them one by one from
> > www.microsoft.com and then run a weird command to install them.
>
> It would be neat to have a Extra-Files: header, which APT or dselect
> methods could use to fetch files during the download phase so Realaudio
> and such can install without requiring the user to download anything.
Great idea! I would love to see this.
Have fun,
Avery
P.S. I contacted Microsoft's licensing department to try to clarify the font
license, but I doubt I'll get a reply any time soon.
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