Re: Please -- more DFSG-free font packages, if you can maintain them well
Branden,
The issue with fonts is lots of people like to *design* fonts, and few
want to do the very laborious job of hinting the glyphs.
FWIW, I'm told that the manual labor involved in doing the hinting of
a glyph is approximately $10 US; there are people willing to be paid
to do this task. I'm told it is mind-numbingly boring by those who do
it for a living.
And while there are some open source tools for editing fonts, none of
them have addressed the hinting problem, where we have no tools
whatsoever (some commercial tools exist, none are on Linux, and many of
the font foundries use their own proprietary tools).
The issue then is the multiplication of $10 US * # glyphs in a font
face, * # faces in the font family. That turns out to be a lot of
non-fun work and/or very expensive. Even a WGL4 font has 640 glyphs or
so in a single face; a Unicode font face with coverage for many
languages gets much larger than that.
Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic about getting people to do the hinting
part of the job... Maybe I'm wrong, and the first step would be for
someone to write a tool to help help with the hinting (or it will be
a lot more than $10 US of someone's time).
Regards,
Jim
P.S. If you do try to write a font license, please give me a call and
I'll give a brain dump on the concerns that community will raise.
On Fri, 2004-09-17 at 13:22 -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 29, 2004 at 05:30:14PM +0200, Kai Weber wrote:
> > * Gürkan Sengün <gurkan@linuks.mine.nu>:
> >
> > > * Package name : ttf-angular
> >
> > How many font packages are still to come? I think a small collection of
> > high quality fonts is enough to have.
> >
> > I have installed a huge number of more or less freely available TrueType
> > fonts which I hope never will be part of the Debian archives.
>
> I think we should ship as many DFSG-free fonts as we can responsibly
> maintain.
>
> This will provide us with either:
> * A concrete refutation of the common assertion that good fonts are so hard
> to make that no will ever dare license them freely; or
> * An exhibit to the community of areas where we need free alternatives to
> proprietary fonts.
>
> Personally, I remain unconvinced that fonts a problem space so incredibly
> unique that intermixing them with free licensing renders them infeasible.
>
> I also think contrived licenses like that on Bitstream Vera are a bad
> precdent that should not be followed. You can read more about this issue
> in the archives
>
> An LPGL-like license tailored to fonts (e.g., a copyleft, but you can use
> the font anywhere) would be a good idea, I suspect, and permit a
> sustainable free font community to develop.
>
> Any followup on licensing issues should probably be directed to
> debian-legal.
>
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