[Pkg-fonts-devel] Debian version of GNU freefont

[Davide Viti]

Hi,

On Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 11:06:49PM +0100, Christian Perrier wrote:
> Quoting Steve White (stevan.white at googlemail.com):
> > Hi Christian,
> > 
> > I saw your name on a bunch of bug reports for GNU freefont, and Primoz
> > told me you were partly responsible for cleaning the font up for
> > Debian.
> > He proposed that I should implement the changes you made there.
> > 
> > I'm hoping you can give me some advice, and perhaps help, in how to
> > proceed with this.
> > 
> > Are all your changes reflected in the patches on the Freefont bugs?
> > If not, is there a separate version control branch for your changes?
> > Or do you have notes?
> > 
> > I am only now starting to see what a mess this is.  Beside the new
> > format used by FontForge, I immediately see some problems in the
> > large:
> > * many characters far outside the font bounds (sometimes twice as big
> > as they should be)
> > * whole ranges of characters (apparently) duplicated in strange places.
> > * kerning is strangely broken (depending on application)
> > * various other messy problems, such as un-closed paths
> 
> 
> Hello Steve,
> 
> I read about you taking the maintenance of Freefont over. That's great
> news.
> 
> I'm no longer the maintainer of the Debian package, which has been
> taken over by Davide Viti (zinosat at tiscali.it) and the Debian Fonts
> packaging team.

I took the package over a few months ago and prepare just a couple of
updates containing trivial fixes; Christian did alot of work the
previous months but not much happened since then due to upstream
inactivity. 

You effort seems really promising and will hopefully bring new life to
a well known package. As for the Debian Installer, we switched it as
to use ttf-dejavu as default font, but freefont is still used for
rendering most Indic languages, so there's still alot of interest on
it.

> 
> - I think that all changes in the Debian packages are reflected in
> bugs reported to upstream as you found it

definitely; upstream activity on the package happened mostly on the
Debian package, so the BTS is probably the best source of information

regards,
Davide
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