[Pkg-fonts-devel] Packaging teh Conakry font for Debian/Ubuntu

[Nicolas Spalinger]

[..]

> What I hope for is that Conakry (with that name) can be made to work on
> Mac, Linux, and Windows (though I despair of the last) distributed in
> one font that will work on all platforms. Unfortunately I never worked
> out how exactly to get the Linux to work.

Hi Michael (and fellow pkg-fonts members),

The packaging should make it much easier for users of the N'ko script to
enjoy your work on Debian-based platforms :-)

Basically the ttf file is put in a folder (like
/usr/share/fonts/ttf-evertype-conakry/) where fontconfig picks it up,
puts it in a system-wide cache for (nearly) all applications to see.
And then the rest of your files are included and used for all the
descriptive metadata items in the package itself to facilitate finding
fonts, knowing what feature they offer, who are the authors and
supporting foundries, under what licensing they have released, what
documentation and extended font sources they include, etc.

Debian will respect upstream naming within the framework set by the
Reserved Font Name(s) mechanism of the OFL so as not to confuse
end-users and to keep your work linked to the name you have chosen.


BTW, was there something interesting in the branch of your Conakry font
published on the OpenFontLibrary ?
http://openfontlibrary.org/media/files/nko_computers/402

The relevant FONTLOG snippet:
26 May 2008 (Daniel Kahn) <Kankan> Version 1.1
-Added glyphs to support diacritics over U+07D2 NKO LETTER N.
-Added glyphs to support the linking up with other characters of U+07FA
NKO LAJANYALAN
-Added the above glyphs to the Graphite programing.
-Added OpenType programing to work with Pango on Linux and with the hope
of other Opentype rendering engines supporting N'ko in the future.
-Added Unicode ranges to work better with *Multiscribe
-Implemented kerning of U+07CC NKO LETTER I, U+07CB NKO LETTER EE and
U+07D0 NKO LETTER O with U+07F9 NKO EXCLAMATION MARK, U+002E FULL STOP
and U+061F ARABIC QUESTION MARK, both in the Graphite programing as well
as the Opentype programing.
-Implemented kerning between N'ko numbers both in the Graphite
programing as well as the Opentype programing.
-Added glyphs for different em spaces, U+2011 NON-BREAKING HYPHEN and
U+202F NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE for typesetting purposes.
-Implemented punctuation mirroring RTL in the Graphite programing for
those characters that are required by the Unicode standard (characters
mirrored are U+00AB, U+2039, U+2E1C, U+0028, U+003C, U+005B, U+007B,
U+00BB, U+203A, U+2E1D, U+0029, U+003E, U+005D, U+007D).  At the time of
the implementation of mirroring, the mirroring is happening both RTL and
LTR since *Multiscribe was not able to handle the context rule correctly
to make the mirroring happen only RTL.


> There were some bug reports from users about input support. A letter may
> have two diacritics, one above and one below. But the internal mappings
> should work in both directions: Letter+Abovemark+Belowmark and
> Letter+Belowmark+Abovemark.

Hopefully there will be time soon for more testing of the input methods.

> Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

Cheers,

-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
Debian/Ubuntu font teams / OpenFontLibrary
http://planet.open-fonts.org