[Pkg-fonts-devel] GNU FreeFont 20120503 released

[Steve White]

CC'ing answer to Fabian:

Hi Fabian

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 9:03 AM, Fabian Greffrath <fabian at greffrath.com> wrote:
> Hi Steve,
>
> Am 09.06.2012 09:21, schrieb Steve White:
>
>> The argument against this I cannot understand.  First that the spec
>> was unclear (in what
>> respect, I could not understand.  Maybe because it didn't say what
>> they wanted it to say.)
>>  and then that such a setting would break some Windows apps (but no
>> examples were
>> provided -- just a referece to a mailing list...I followed this lead,
>> found a long conversation,
>> but... none  of what I found there indicated a failure caused by
>> setting this flag.  Confusion.)
>
>
> I am not sure if I got this right. There'll be a change in the way FreeType
> interprets metrics of monospaced fonts based on a flag being either set or
> not

I suppose "interprets the metrics" is a good summary.  I don't
understand it completely.
The effect is, a font that is otherwise monospaced, and has the OS/2 monospaced
property, is displayed with letters of width that vary, unless the
"isFixedPitch" flag is also set.

On Windows, a font will usually not be recognized as monospace, unless the
"isFixedPitch" flag is set.

> and a change you proposed for FontForge to set this flag automatically
> has been rejected, right?
>
Someone loudly and persistently disapproved.  He produced one poor
argument after another, (citing sources not easily available).  I checked
everything he mentioned -- they all appeared to support *my* case,
not his.  I'm still looking going through a long discussion on
the private OpenType mailing list, to see if anybody has a solid
argument against setting this flag. (The flag is mentioned, but this is not
really what they were discussing, near as I can tell.)

> Depending on how plausible and convincing this change is (at the moment, to
> be honest it is not, could you please provide some more background, e.g.
> some links to the patch and the discussion following it?), maybe we could
> add it as a distro patch in Debian.
>
Well that's a thought, and I appreciate it.  I don't think there's any
reason for Debian to get involved to this degree at this point.
 (There have been flame wars, as I said, and
you are likely to incur somebody's wrath by altering FontForge in this way.)

I was just informing you that there might be a problem: at the time, I
felt I had exhausted all reasonable avenues -- but then I rememberd
I'm a programmer.

The FontForge discussions are at
  https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fontforge-devel
March and later this year.

A very messy discussion (starting with issues probably in PyGame, that
moved into discussion of new FreeType features, and then a re-has of
the FontForge question)
   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ttf-freefont/+bug/1001033

There were also some discusions on the closed OpenType list, that may
be pertinent.

>> So... I'm considering other options, such as setting the flag
>> *outside* of FontForge in
>> the build process.  It's a cludge but it would work.  Just, it'll take
>> a day or two to write it.
>
> You mean, as in patching the binary font files? That sounds fragile...
>
No, a program that sets the flag after FF builds it.  I'm testing it now.
Good exercise anyway, maybe this code will be useful for other things.

Cheers