[Debian-in-workers] Problems with a couple of fonts

[Jaldhar H. Vyas]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Soumyadip Modak wrote:

> >
> >   Embeddable: Never Embed/No Editing
> >
> >That clearly makes the font non-free.
>

There is a program called fontforge in Debian which will allow you to
remove this flag.

> Secondly, the other bug is about (#254242) :
>
> On Mon, 2004-06-14 at 01:48, Stefan Baums wrote:
> >The fonts Gargi-1.1.ttf and Pothana2000.ttf contain nonsensical
> >glyphs in the code positions U+200C and U+200D.  In fact, however,
> >these code positions are control characters (ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER
> >and ZERO WIDTH JOINER) and should therefore not be in the font at
> >all (and _definitely_ not contain any glyphs).  The presence of
> >these characters in the fonts can break their essential use as
> >control characters, and can make the fonts useless for the
> >rendering of Nagari and the Telugu script as per the Unicode
> >specification.  What is worse, on a system using fontconfig, the
> >mere presence of these fonts can break rendering of these scripts
> >even if other, correct OpenType fonts for them are available.
>
> I'll need some guidance here. As an intermediate measure, I'm removing
> the Gargi and Pothana fonts. But after that what am I supposed to do?
>

Again fontforge is the answer.  you can remove just those glyphs instead
of the whole font.

> I downloaded the Indlinux-Hindi tarball, and I copied over a couple of
> fonts from that tarball, over to the ttf-indic package. The tarball
> claims that the Pothana2000 font is GPL, so I put that in into the
> copyright file. Now it seems that the Telugu translation project is
> quoting my copyright file as claiming Pothana2000 to be GPL :) Can
> anybody give some pointers on what possible course of action should I
> take ?
>

I think removing the fonts is too drastic.  I feel the authors probably
left the restrictions in the font by accident.  First contact the
copyright holders and clarify that they do want the GPL.  Get them to
make the necessary changes or at least allow you to make the changes.  If
you cannot get this resolved in a decent amount of time then go ahead and
remove the fonts.

-- 
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>
La Salle Debain - http://www.braincells.com/debian/