RE: unifont - consensus on dependencies
Drake,
Okay, I'll plan on "ttf-unifont", "xfonts-unifont", and "unifont"
package names. The "xfonts-unifont" package will contain a PCF font,
but not a BDF font (since BDF fonts now seem forbidden according to the
latest Policy Manual). The source package won't contain a pre-built
TrueType font or a pre-built PCF font. I'll be replacing Sarge with the
latest stable Etch release to build the final Debian packages. I think
it is fitting to build a font package under a release named after
Etch-a-Sketch. :-)
I haven't built the PCF version yet; I've just been using the BDF
version for testing (and the TrueType version for daily use). Since PCF
is binary whereas BDF is ASCII, and since Debian PCF fonts are gzipped,
I would expect a gzipped PCF font to be about the same size or a little
smaller than a gzipped BDF font. The gzipped BDF font is about 1.3
Megabytes. The uncompressed BDF font is about 10 Megabytes.
Yes, the vast bulk of the source package is shared to produce the BDF
and TrueType fonts. There is just one 854 byte script to convert the
unifont.hex formatted sources files into BDF, plus lines in a Makefile
to invoke that script and then convert with "bdftopcf" -- not worth
splitting the source.
The Debian Policy Manual does need to add policy on TrueType fonts.
TrueType and its derivatives (such as SIL's Graphite) are the
foreseeable future direction in font technology, especially for complex
scripts.
Thanks for your insights.
Paul Hardy
unifoundry@unifoundry.com
GPG Key ID: E6E6E390
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: unifont - consensus on dependencies
From: Drake Wilson <drake@begriffli.ch>
Date: Sun, June 22, 2008 1:21 pm
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Cc: Anthony Fok <foka@debian.org>
> I am aware of the /usr/share/fonts/truetype directory. I've been
> running Sarge, and it is there. However, that is not under the X11
> fonts tree. If I place a font in /usr/share/fonts/truetype, is it still
> legitimate to claim a font as being in section "main/x11"?
If not, then there's a big pile of ttf-* packages in sid that have
incorrect packaging. Since the Policy Manual is silent on this, I'd
expect that to be the correct place to install TrueType fonts from a
package in the x11 section, though I can't find authoritative
documentation to that effect from a cursory search.
De facto practice in the archive suggests that the TrueType package be
called "ttf-unifont", the PCF-only package be called "xfonts-unifont",
and the source package be called "unifont" (noting that the source
package and built package namespaces are somewhat orthogonal to each
other).
> I could have the "unifont" package contain the pre-built TrueType font
> plus all sources. It takes about an hour plus 1 Gigabyte of virtual
> memory to build the TrueType version with FontForge.
Normally you don't provide sources in built packages unless there's a
specific reason for it, as far as I know. Users can get sources using
[apt-get source] or similar to retrieve the source packages.
I'm not sure what effect a highly-intensive build process like that
has on the autobuilder network; presumably that can be answered by
someone more knowledgeable than me, but it's something you'd want to
consider.
> I put work into getting the combining characters working properly
> (with zero width) in the TrueType version. The BDF version doesn't
> have that capability, and so neither would a PCF version.
That would be useful information for the package descriptions; that
doesn't preclude packaging both versions. I would tend to default to
packaging both versions, assuming they come from the same source,
unless there's a good reason not to package the PCF version. How
large are the PCF files? (I didn't see that information in your last
message; if it was there, I apologize.) Is there a significant
difference in the _source_ size if you reduce it to only the
information needed to build the TrueType fonts, or is most of the
information shared? I would tend to imagine the latter for a package
of this nature.
---> Drake Wilson
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