[Debian-in-workers] Bug#736464: fonts-taml-tscu: dead upstream - successor is Serafettin Cartoon

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Jonas Smedegaard (2014-01-23 22:59:08)
> Serafettin Cartoon looks like a direct successor of TSCu_Comic,

Whoops - hold your horses: Serafettin is *not* usable as direct 
replacement in its current form.

One possible issue is that characters in the Tamil range may be 
"shuffled", because one of the two highlights of the new font is change 
of encoding from legacy [TSCII] 1.7 to Unicode (the other being more 
complete Latin1 coverage).

[TSCII]: http://www.tscii.org/Mirror/tools.html

Another issue is that the fontconfig snippet provided by Fedora won't 
work in all cases, seemingly because of broken/unusual hinting:

showttf (from fontforge-extras) shows these for TSCu_Comic:

  NAME table:
  Family=TSCu_Comic
  Subfamily=Normal

  OS/2 table:
  weightClass=400
  widthClass=500

Here's the same values for most "main" of the new collection (8 fonts in 
2 families):

  NAME table:
  Family=Serafettin Cartoon
  Subfamily=Book

  OS/2 table:
  weightClass=400
  widthClass=9

Seems Serafettin Cartoon was bootstrapped by importing th .ttf into 
fontforge, which messed with Subfamily (Normal and Regular is same, but 
Book means DemiLight) and widthClass (fontforge uses 1-9 and should've 
divided by 100 instead of crudely rounding down).

Scribus gets the intended weight names, but Inkscape (known to be picky 
about font names, as it is SVG-based with CSS font naming) see the 
default weight as "UltraExpanded".  The font best visually matching 
TSCu_Comic is listed in Inkscape as "Serafettin Cartoon Condensed Bold" 
even though the Condensed family only really has weights "Book" and 
"Italic" (explicitly selecting the "Book" weight, save, and reopen, and 
Inkscape has flipped to that bogus "Bold" weight again) - and slanting 
is only possible by using the "computed" italic button - explicitly 
selecting the actual "Italic" weight is not recognized when saving.

Oh, and that Condensed weight only approximates the visual style of 
TSCu_Comics.


> Please consider drop TSCu_Comic and package Serafettin Cartoon 
> instead, with hinting as mentioned at that last Fedora bugreport to 
> have it seemlesly replace for previous users of TSCu_Comic.

...so I withdraw above suggestion. Seraffettin Cartoon is merely 
_derived_ from TSCu_Comic.

It is still interesting to have Serafettin Cartoon packaged for Debian.  
If you intend to do so, I suggest to keep this bugreport open even if 
(or when ;-) ) fixing below URLs, and pass it to that other package when 
it exist.


> On a related note, Homepage is listed as the Alioth project page, 
> which I believe is wrong: Homepage field is for the *upstream* home 
> (not home of packaging!).

Homepage: http://tamillinux.sourceforge.net/

Download URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tamillinux/ (ftp site 
linked from homepage is dead!)


NB! Upstream tarball should probably be repackaged: contains additional 
DFSG-nonfree fonts according to 
http://tamillinux.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tamillinux/tamil-fonts/Readme.txt?view=markup

Another point you might want to mention in debian/copyright is that the 
origin of the TSCu_Comic font seems to be a donation from thinnai.com 
according to http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-44254.html (notice the link 
tied to the author's name.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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