Re: Question: Is there interest in any fonts hackathon/workshop sessions at DebCamp/DebConf
On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 5:58 AM, Nathan Willis wrote:
> - Recently I've been drilling into the question of how users manage fonts on
> their systems and how deep the difficulties with that go.
Thanks for your work on that.
> --- Getting reserved font names (RFNs) in OFL fonts tracked properly
I'd like to see RFNs mostly go away, see plan for that in the other thread :)
> --- Working to get specimens included in font packages
Many font packages are only ever installed due to dependencies from
other packages, for font packages with reverse dependencies I would
suggest putting the specimens/showcase documents into a -doc package
instead of in the main font package. I expect many of these documents
will also be large, some even larger than the font itself, I would
like to see those split off into -doc packages too.
> This may involve working with the upstream designer to make the
> specimen document available under DFSG-acceptable terms.
There is also the issue of documents where the source has not been
released or is in a proprietary format that cannot be converted to the
final form (such as PDF) without proprietary tools.
> --- Figuring out a way to get font usage documentation into packages in a
> uniform way that's useful to users.
Unfortunately uniform integration of documentation in general into
user interfaces is pretty terrible in Debian and elsewhere in the
FLOSS world so this may involve work outside the world of fonts.
> - There are older and unmaintained fonts that are under various levels of
> "openness" but for which there is not buildable source available.
I would say that they should be left as-is unless the plan is to
create an upstream community around each font (or for all abandoned
fonts) and continue to develop and improve them. In the world of open
games, there is a group of folks called Libre Games that are taking
over abandoned games and maintaining them. A similar project could be
done for libre fonts. An alternate plan would be to move the relevant
glyphs to other fonts that already have a community of maintainers.
https://libregames.gitlab.io/
> PS: I know it's confusing that we use the term "specimen" in two different
> senses.... I don't know if there's a simple solution. Although I think that
> the still-image character preview image could be called something else
> unambiguously, like "sample image" or "character image". But I digress...
Since Wikipedia doesn't explain this adequately, I just read this page:
https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fyti/situational-typography/type-specimens
Perhaps "screenshot" or "character sample" or "catalog item/image"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_catalog
Adobe uses "specimen book" for the long form:
https://www.adobe.com/products/type/adobe-type-specimens.html
fonts.com seems to use "catalog images" for their images:
https://www.fonts.com/font/linotype/avenir-next
https://cdnimg.fonts.net/CatalogImages/23/90672.png
fontlibrary.org uses "catalogue" for a collection of such images:
https://fontlibrary.org/en/catalogue
So "catalog image" seems to be the right term to me.
PS: can anyone update this to mention font sources?
https://fontlibrary.org/en/guidebook/how_to_contribute_to_an_existing_font
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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