[Pkg-fonts-devel] Q: source-*-sans fonts

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Hi Yamane-san,

[sent again to team rather than discretely]

Quoting Hideki Yamane (2015-08-18 20:33:30)
> At https://github.com/adobe-fonts, there's a lot of "source-*" fonts. 
> source-han-sans is same as Noto-CJK (fonts-noto-cjk), right?
> And how about other source-*-sans fonts, are they already packaged 
> with another name as above? If not, we would file ITP for it.

Yes, almost (as I understand it): source-* has same shapes as font-noto 
but not same name, and (I suspect) will not have same future 
development.

Googles acitivities in freeing fonts is appreciated, but also emphasizes 
the (challenging for redistributors) issue of rebranding: It seems to me 
that font-noto really is a rebranding and potential fork of source-*.

If (and then as long as) the fonts only differ in their name, not in 
either shapes or kerning values, I suggest we dont package both but 
istead add a hint in fontconfig that one is provided by the other.

Ideally we should automate the process of identifying changes to 
kerning: Google is mostly interested in Android where kerning values are 
ignoring and thus just wasting disk space and memory on that environment 
- I have seen several cases of Google "updating" fonts to drop kerning 
values, which is clearly harmful outside of Android.

Can anyone help with figuring out how to automate that?

Specifically for the Noto vs. source-* the comparison will be quite a 
heavy process (the fonts are huge!) so probably shouldn't be done at 
build time but outside of the packaging routines - but that's a minor 
detail, we first need to actually find a usable routine...


 - Jonas

P.S.

I already have a routine to (sloppily) resolve coverage at build time 
and include that info in long description: See the packaging of 
fonts-noto if you wanna borrow that for other fonts - or ask if you need 
help isolating it from the CDBS stuff used there.

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

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