[Pkg-fonts-devel] Fwd: About your Garamond fonts

[Rogério Brito]

Dear Gaël and people from the pkg-fonts team,

First of all, I just created a repository with my modifications to the
font and it is available at:

http://git.debian.org/?p=users/rbrito-guest/urw-garamond.git

Of course, *any* contributions are more than welcome. And it is also
fun to learn how to play with the fonts.

2010/4/5 Gael Varoquaux <gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org>:
[About the small caps being included in the sfd's]
>> > I don't think I did.

I would appreciate one comment here: I can, of course, generate the
small caps with fontforge the same way (or actually, similar) to what
you did, scaling the fonts by 80% (instead of fontforge's automatic
84%), but I am not sure how to handle the kerning after producing the
fonts.

Do you happen to have any comments on how I should proceed with
respect to the kerning?

Of course, with the automatic generation of the small caps, we can
generate them for all shapes and weights of the font.

Some adjustments will, highly probably, be necessary after the
automatic generation of small caps takes place, so that they are not
too thin when compared to the other caps.

For those just reading this, one problem with the generic scaling to
produce small caps from regular caps is that, when we are scaling the
letters, we also scale their stroke widths which may mean that they
appear thin when put together with other fonts.

>> You also have some kerning information there and this is some precious
>> information---were they obtained in any deterministic form or also in
>> an "artistic" way?
>
> 'artistic'. I believe a good deal of the work was done by editing the
> virtual police file in vim :).

Right. :-) I also did some hand editing right on the sfd's file, but
it seems that fontforge gets confused with latin-1/utf-8 chars (e.g.,
my name).

I use emacs only because my head is small and I can't keep track of
changing modes in vi-inspired editors. :-)

>> I would like to thank you very much for all the work that you have
>> shared so far and, also, by the kindness of your e-mails.
>
> Well, _I_ would like to thank you for picking up this work and
> transforming it into something useful to a community (Debian, in your
> case). I have grown to have a lot of respect for people who get things
> done for others.

I sincerely want to carry the torch with any Garamond-like font. And
if people from other distributions care enough to help here, we could
have something that could evolve into a rich family with various
weights, shapes (slanted comes to mind).

There are some obvious things that I would like to have:

* I want to typeset Paul Erdős name with the proper double acute sign,
not with two dots (regular umlauts). Interestingly, some commercial
fonts don't even allow this, which is a shame, after you pay them a
lot of money (and fonts can cost *a* *lot*).

A good reference for this should be <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic>.

* I want to have Greek characters to typeset mathematics in a visually
compatible form with the text;

* Small caps + oldstyle figures + stylistic alternates.

I will still have to learn how to (automatically) generate the proper
(legacy) TeX fonts with these features---perhaps selecting the glyphs
with a python script... But this is a further plan that won't be
addressed now. Getting an OpenType font encoded in Unicode is enough
for the moment.

*Any* comments are welcome. Acutally, any documents that would be
relevant here are also quite welcome.


Thank you so much,

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org