[Pkg-fonts-devel] license violations with embedded binary copies of GNU FreeFont?

[Nicolas Spalinger]

On 07/07/11 08:49, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 4:06 PM, Nicolas Spalinger
> <nicolas_spalinger at sil.org> wrote:
> 
>> AFAICT pdffonts reads it from the PDF file structure directly.
> 
> Huh, I did not know that existed... nice.
> 
>> It seems fontaine doesn't do this, so until we dive into the lintian
>> check I suggest we simply plug the little fontembedding python fontforge
>> script into our review:
>>
>> I committed the script in my people/ folder (it's on
>> http://utilities.open-fonts.org/ as well) and the small mods on our
>> review scripts.
>>
>> Could you please test/improve/deploy?
> 
> Done and doing a full run now.
> 
> Can you explain more about the embedding bits and what each one means?
> I think we need something that checks if each one is individually set
> and then prints the explanation for that bit.

All the details for the fsType part of the spec are on
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/opentype/index_os2.html
(search for fsType in that page).

The corresponding dropdown in Fontforge's UI is briefly described on:
http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/fontinfo.html#TTF-Values

I admit the fontembedding script is crude and a bit obscure and I guess
we could add some more explanation about what means what in the output.

Not sure about checking separately, I think a better script could be
written, maybe something using fonttools?

But basically if the value is not O then there are restrictions left in
the font file that we should advocate upstreams to remove. All
libre/open fonts should have their fsType set to 0.


BTW there's been a project for a few years to extend these restriction
fields: http://www.eeulaa.org/  but I don't think it has gained much
traction and much use...



Cheers,


-- 
Nicolas Spalinger,
SIL NRSI volunteer - http://scripts.sil.org
Debian fonts task force -  http://pkg-fonts.alioth.debian.org
Open font community - http://planet.open-fonts.org