[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#737105: Bug#737105: fonts-droid: missing some .ttf files

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Hideki Yamane (2014-02-04 12:57:50)
>  What I've sent in this thread first is based on Android 4.3, and 
>  Fabian said is 4.4.* based one. Some of Droid fonts were removed from 
>  upstream tree, as Fabian says, so
> 
>   - update to 4.4.2r1 based one
>   - install all Droid fonts included in 4.4.2r1
> 
>  would be fine for Droid fonts, IMO.
> 
>  DroidSansDevanagari-Regular.ttf, DroidSansTamil-Bold.ttf, 
>  DroidSansTamil-Regular.ttf, DroidSansThai.ttf would be NOT included 
>  to fonts-droid package, but Droid Sans Fallback as mentioned by Jonas 
>  will be included (FallbackLegacy, too). It also solves #714436 issue.

Don't just include those other Fallback variants - it needs more care, 
it seems...

First of all, copyright file is currently inaccurate:

  It was downloaded from data/fonts in http://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base

There is no "data/fonts" at that web page.  What would be slightly 
better would be something like this:

  It was git clone'd as data/fonts from http://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base

Or even better:

  Original source is data/fonts dir in git clone of
  http://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base
  - also more conveniently accessible at
  https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base/tree/master/data/fonts

With that knowledge, I found (no proper documentation, but)
https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base/commit/5e7a09 and 
https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base/commit/562c45 and 
https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base/commit/b394df 
indicates these features of the Fallback variants:

  * DroidSansFallback.ttf
    + includes Hangul
    - lacks CJK Ext A
  * DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf
    - lacks Hangul (instead relies on NanumGothic.ttf)
    + includes CJK Ext A
    + includes Currency symbols for AFN BDT INR KHR IRR/OMR/YER
  * DroidSansFallbackLegacy.ttf
    - lacks bugfixes and improvements since 2010-02-09
    - lacks improvements to Hanzi

It seems to me that for _most_ Debian purposes DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf 
is suitable, but DroidSansFallback.ttf is still preferred when needing a 
single font covering most possible (as is the case for Ghostscript) and 
DroidSansFallbackLegacy.ttf is still preferred when additionally there 
are extreme memory constraints.

Therefore please ship not only the "best" of the three fallback 
variants, but also the other two, and document their differences.

As it seems all three variants register as exact same name, I suspect 
special care needs to be taken to ensure that DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf 
is used in normal cases.

Best option is to include fontconfig hints - I just don't know how to do 
that and if it is possible at all to distinguish by path rather than by 
name and other declared hints.

Second-best option is probably to ship the files outside of fontconfig 
paths, and registering them with update-alternatives.  That allows both 
to change system-wide (by use of update-alternatives) and to explicitly 
use an alternative variant (as is needed for Ghostscript).


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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