[Pkg-fonts-devel] Fonts in the google Font Directory [was: Talking with an upstream about changing his license]

[Rogério Brito]

Hi, Fabian and others.

On May 20 2010, Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> Hi Rogério et al.,
> 
> >http://code.google.com/webfonts/family?family=Cardo
> 
> I am sad to see that none of the free fonts that Google lists in
> their new Font Directory are packaged for Debian already.

I am talking with David Perry privately for some months, as I said
previously. I am, for the sake of this discussion, including him in the
Carbon Copies, as he may appreciate that other people are interested in
his work.

The Cardo font is one of my main objectives to get in Debian, since they
are one of the only Aldine/Bembo-like that are free, to the best of my
knowledge.

Furthermore, he told me that he is not a Mathematician and that would
welcome input in the necessities of Mathematicians (I guess that this
mean help with the support of MATH tables that OpenType fonts can have
and I can help slightly here).

I particularly like the Bembo looks (perhaps a Sabon look?) and Perry's
font has a wide range of glyphs and, being open, they can surpass what
some commercial offerings do, especially for people concerned about
(La)TeX.

There's only one gotcha: despite Perry's intentions when releasing Cardo
under the OFL, the font still has an embedded license that says that it
should not be used for commercial purposes, which is clearly not the
current view of David Perry.

David, if you could release just a minor version of Cardo (say,
0.0098.1) just changing the license to SIL OFL or explicitly state in an
e-mail that the embedded license of Cardo should be ignored and the SIL
OFL should be used instead (like you did for Google), then I can
package/upload it right away.

> Shouldn't we try to push them all in? I've seen there are ITPs for the
> Droid fonts for some time now [1], but noone seems to care for these
> fonts anymore.

I have private copies prepared of:

* Heuristica [1, 2], an improved version of Utopia
* ParaType Sans [3]
* URW Garamond No. 8 [4] and its improved version [5]
* Droid

(I wrote the Wikipedia article on Utopia, BTW [6])

But I plan on working on the remaining ones, especially:

* Crimson Text
* Sorts Mill Goudy (I am in relatively constant contact with its author)
* Vollkorn

As can be guessed, I am a big fan of serifed fonts (not for computer
screens, though). :-)

Another one that looks interesting is Open Baskerville [7], but it is
developed in a format called UFO (basically, XML) and I don't know if we
have software that can edit it directly.

> Please keep me in CC, I am not subscribed to this list.

Here you go. BTW, even though I am subscribed, I like to receveive
CC'ies of messages that are not only directed to the mailing list, but
to me.



Regards, Rogério Brito.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/580005
[2] http://rb.doesntexist.org/debian/otf-apanov-heuristica_0.2.1-1.dsc
[3] http://github.com/rojkov/ttf-paratype-sans/tree/a673b94e
[4] http://rb.doesntexist.org/debian/t1-urw-garamondno8_0.0.20050707-3.dsc
[5] http://github.com/rbrito/urw-garamond
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_%28typeface%29
[7] http://github.com/klepas/open-baskerville

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://rb.doesntexist.org : Packages for LaTeX : algorithms.berlios.de
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