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Re: Fonts working "out of the box"



On Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 10:40:09PM +0200, Claes Andersson wrote:
> There are many issues with fonts. As far as I know, no good truetype fonts 
> can be directly distributed with debian. 

No good English/European truetype fonts. I believe the Japanese and 
Chinese have decent truetype fonts. (Yes, they include ASCII, but the
English part usually really sucks.) It might be useful for people who
look at free fonts on the net to see if you can convince an author to
release one under a DFSG-free license, but there's not that many good
useful (non-grunge/decrotive) full (at least complete ASCII; preferably
a full codepage support) fonts out there.

> In the policy I could find rules for how 
> font packages should work, but I could not find information about how to 
> properly configure packages to use "good-looking" fonts. 

That's partially because "good-looking" is very subjective. This shouldn't
be policy, but it could be useful in the developer's reference.

> Ideally, should 
> bitmapped fonts ever be scaled up? Are there not enough other fonts that can 
> be used instead? Is it possible to prevent it?

To prevent it, use non-bitmapped fonts when chosing fonts, and change conffiles
to refer to non-bitmapped fonts. There are cases where fonts may have to 
be scaled - as of yet, the -misc-fixed fonts are the most comprehensive Unicode
glyph repetiore in Debian.
 
> Should Debian identify a couple of good quality fonts and try to use them 
> consistently? 

I guess we could recommend the URW fonts, but they're ISO-8859-1 
(Western European support sans proper quotes and Euro) only.

> I realize that there are many other issues with fonts, like 
> internationalization. 

Internationalization is not usually a font problem. Localization (getting
fonts for different languages) is the problem.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and 
laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg

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