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

[Steve White]

Davide,

Good to hear from you!  I think we can get some things done.
(But slowly, of course.  Like most of us, I have limited time.)

On Feb 2, 2008 11:45 AM, Davide Viti <zinosat at tiscali.it> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 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.
>
Sorry, I'm not up on the jargon.  Does this mean, due to inactivity in
the FreeFont project?

> 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.
>
To my eye, DejaVu and FreeFont are quite different typefaces, beside
they character sets they cover.  I would personally want the choice,
even just to display English.

My personal goal is to make sure at least one free font covers certain
technical ranges: HTML 4's Character Entities, and various levels of
LaTeX characters.

> >
> > - 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
>
Who/what is BTS?

Do you mean: you simply fixed bugs that were outstanding in the
FreeFont bugs list, in the Debian package?

If that is right, my question is, what is your advice on how to move
those fixes back into the FreeFont version control system?

Do you (or BTS) have notes, as to exactly what changes were implemented?

There are two serious overall bugs with FreeSerif as in CVS.  One with
line height, the other with kerning.  FreeMono also has a problem
regarging its really being monospaced.

I have read the discussions of these problems, and done some tests.  I
doubt that the line height issue is so easy to solve as people think.
I hope I can count on you for technical advice!

Cheers!