[Pkg-fonts-devel] Font review reloaded

[Miriam Ruiz]

Hi,

I've made some changes in the font review script [1]. A friend of mine
was helping to port it to Python, but I lost track of that, so at
least I corrected some stuff I really wanted to, and added some
primitive support for other font types than ttf, even though they're
not graphically represented yet.

As there keep appearing newer versions of the different font types in
the archive, the comparison against md5 hashes is not longer valid to
prevent duplication. I tried to make a database of hashes of the
different versions of some fonts, bur it seems that when they're
compiled from source (as dejavu, for example), I'm getting a different
md5 every time I repeat the process. I have no clue about what could
it be, maybe the bytes generated depend on the time, or the
compilation path, or whatever reason (it happens the same with binary
compilation of programs, so nothing new under the sun).

Is there any way to compare fonts (I'm thinking mostly about TTF) that
would be independent of the instant of creation (assuming exactly the
same sources)? I'm even thinking about having a big virtual canvas,
drawing the fonts on it, and compare them, or something like that. Any
ideas?

Greeetings,
Miry

[1] http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-fonts/people/baby/showfonts/getfonts.sh