Re: Questions to all DPL candidates
At Sun, 13 Mar 2005 22:17:26 +0100, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
> Hi, Thiemo Seufer wrote:
> > Replacement fonts are a standard feature, and using is usually breaks
> > formatting of the document.
> This may be a nitpick, but documents which *break*, instead of just
> looking somewhat sub-optimal, are mostly designed (I'm using that word
> loosely) by people who still think that a word processing program works
> like a typewriter.
Erm, no. Many "metric compatible" fonts aren't exactly that way.
See http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/technotes/tfmetrics.pdf for an
interesting comparison of Palatino.
For the "base 14" postscript/PDF fonts, these fonts are not embedded
in documents, so metric compatibility *does* affect common use cases.
Font licences are a real problem. Font licencing traditions were laid
down a long time ago and (for example), many of them only allow
redistribution in a subsetted (ie: embedded in some document) form -
the entire font may not be redistributed.
If we go for the "no preferred format is no source at all" extreme,
then almost *no* fonts are usable. Do you have Bitstream Vera in a
form thats appropriate to edit? (A notable exception here is the
fonts developed recently for wine. They *are* actually compiled by
fontforge at build time)
To get back on topic, I feel that winning the free font battle is
something it would be good to do. However, I don't feel that we get
closer to winning the free software war by junking almost all of our
fonts right now. In particular, non-latin1 languages generally can't
make do with ASCII and for many of these, there are no appropriate
free fonts available. I do *not* wish to drop our (good) l10n efforts
in order to claim "100% free fonts" - that all seems just a bit silly.
[aside]
> The same thing happens if people want to print the nicely letter-formatted
> text some US colleague mailed them on *gasp* A4 *shock* paper, and no font
> equivalency will help you with that one.
In PDF, at least, the "crop box" is able to be repositioned on the
actual "media box". Not a magical solution, but it does allow tools
to get A4 vs letter right in many "normal" cases.
--
- Gus
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