[Pkg-fonts-devel] Comments regarding ttf-sawarabi-gothic package description

[Ben Finney]

Christian Perrier <bubulle at debian.org> writes:

> Quoting Hideki Yamane (henrich at debian.or.jp):
> > Description: Japanese gothic font, made from scratch
> >  This is new Japanese font, made from scratch. It has not so many glyphs, yet
> >  (about 300 characters). It contains alphabet, numeric, hiragana, katakana,
> >  kanji and so on.
> 
> - "This is <foo>" is discouraged as long descriptions should be
> somewhat autonomous and it creates a link between the long description
> and the synopsis. Better use "This package provides <foo>"

Or better, let the long description stand alone:

    Sawarabi Gothic is a font for Japanese text …

presuming that “Sawarabi Gothic” is the full name of the font.

> - "not so many glyphs yet": that makes the descrciption dependent on
> the package development and you'll have to adapt it along the packag's
> life, which one usually forgets..:-)
> 
> - "from scratch" does not add very useful information

Yes to both of these. The long description should help the reader make
a decision about whether to install the package; it is not a place for
the developer of the work to ramble about it.

> - leading capital letter in the synopsis. Here, if you use "Japanese"
> as first word, you must use a capital, of course...so better change
> the order of words

I think it's fine to start with a capital letter, *if and only if*
that would make sense in context inside a sentence.

> Description: gothic font for Japanese
>  This package provides an entirely new font for Japanese. The font
>  mostly covers the ranges for Latin, Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji
>  glyphs.
>
> ...still, that description suffers from a few glitches: after all, in
> 10 years, it won't be "entirely new". So I'm not completely sure that
> this wording is the best to carry the idea that the font is not built
> from another font.

My attempt:

    Description: Sawarabi Gothic font for Japanese text
     Sawarabi Gothic is an original sans serif font covering the
     Latin, Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji glyphs.

> And this description does not exactly say what makes that font
> different from other fonts for Japanese...

It would be good if there was something more there, written
specifically to help the reader understand the package enough to make
a decision about whether to install it. E.g. “it is designed to look
good in movie subtitles” or “it is designed for high readability”,
or whatever sets the font apart.

-- 
 \        “Most people don't realize that large pieces of coral, which |
  `\       have been painted brown and attached to the skull by common |
_o__)    wood screws, can make a child look like a deer.” —Jack Handey |
Ben Finney
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