[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#780233: Bug#780233: fonts-inconsolata: Please package v1.014 from Google Font Directory

[Maximiliano Curia]

¡Hola Paul!

El 2015-03-14 a las 11:32 +0800, Paul Wise escribió:
> On Fri, 2015-03-13 at 16:13 +0100, Antoine Musso wrote:
> I mean the existing package doesn't have a problem but updating to the 
> Google version might make a move to contrib needed, which would be sad.
>
>> That is a similar issue to the FontForge sources above. Other fonts 
>> package probably ships .VFB. If they are in contrib, I guess Inconsolata 
>> should be moved there as well.
>
> Inconsolata only needs to move to contrib if we use the Google version, 
> as far as we can tell Raph's version comes with full sources that can be 
> rebuilt using only DFSG-free tools from Debian main. Google's doesn't.
>
> An alternative might be to keep Raph's version, patch the source to fix 
> the issue reported and build the font from source. Unfortunately we need 
> Raph to provide us with the build process he used first.

I'm adding Dave Crossland and Christoph Haag to this discussion.

Dave is the author of cantarell fonts, and has been doing the updates in the 
google/fonts Inconsolata, and up to last year in 
https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/ as well, but, as code.google.com 
has stopped receiving changes, the latest changes in the binary repository 
dont seem to have a corresponding public repository.

Dave, would it be possible to have a public source repository with the new 
changes for Inconsolata? Also, would it be feasible to have the font sources 
in a format that can be worked on with free software?



Christoph Haag created a new fork of Inconsolata (and a bunch of other fonts) 
[1] that keeps the fonts in a fontforge compatible format, and also maintains 
a web interface [2] that exports the binary formats of the fonts.

The sources seems to have been converted from the vbf files in a scriptable 
fashion. (*1)
Also Christoph's git repository documents the conversion procedure and 
provides a the requested regular and bold fonts.

Christoph, what was the exact procedure needed to convert obtain the sfdir 
format from the inconsolata font? Is there any data lost in the process?

Happy hacking,

[1]: https://github.com/lafkon/fontain.git
[2]: http://fontain.org/

(*1): If the conversion from vbf to fontforge can be done using Free Software 
without lossing information then the vbf and the fontforge formats would be 
idem potent and we could consider the vbf format a dfsg compatible source 
format.
-- 
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for
machines to execute."
-- Hal Abelson, "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"
Saludos /\/\ /\ >< `/
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