[Pkg-fonts-devel] location of woff files

Nicolas Spalinger nicolas_spalinger at sil.org
Tue May 30 10:27:49 UTC 2017


On 05/11/2017 12:30 PM, Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> Hi Nicolas,
> 
> Nicolas Spalinger wrote:
>> I'm interested in knowing more about fontconfig-using server apps.
> 
> I was never talking about server apps, I was talking about non-desktop apps.
> 
>> Do you have use-cases and specific examples? A few of the many
>> applications you refer to?
> 
> I have given two examples, cups-filters and XeTex, neither of both is
> restricted to server or desktop usage. One does it right ("fontconfig,
> give me a list of fonts that match my pattern, I will iterate through this
> list and pick the one that fits best") and the other one does not.
> 
> I am sure there are more not-only-desktop and not-only-server apps that
> use fontconfig in some way [*]. At least, there is nothing that speaks
> against using fontconfig on one system or the other.
> 
>> How many desktop apps do you know that support WOFF?
> 
> How is that even relevant?
> 
> I am a bit confused by the way you apparently try to defend XeTeX's
> fragile usage of fontconfig by stating that fontconfig should be
> restricted to desktop usage, whereas XeTeX itself isn't restricted to that
> in any way?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Fabian
> 
> [*] might be possible to query UDD to select packages that have a
> dependency on libfontconfig1 but none on libx11-6, not even through
> packages they depend on)


I'm sorry for any misunderstanding and if we seem to be talking past each other. 
Let me try and clarify what I was asking about. 

BTW I do appreciate all the work you have done in this team :-) 


I would simply like to point out what the official W3C WOFF spec says in https://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF/

"2. General Requirements

The primary purpose of the WOFF format is to package fonts linked to Web documents by means of CSS @font-face rules. User agents supporting the WOFF file format for linked fonts must respect the requirements of the CSS3 Fonts specification ([CSS3-Fonts] Section 4.1: The @font-face rule). In particular, such linked fonts are only available to the documents that reference them; they MUST NOT be made available to other applications or documents on the user's system.

NOTE: the WOFF format is intended for use with @font-face to provide fonts linked to specific Web documents. Therefore, WOFF files must not be treated as an installable font format in desktop operating systems or similar environments. The WOFF-packaged data will typically be decoded to sfnt format for use by existing font-rendering APIs that expect OpenType font data, but such decoded font must not be exposed to other documents or applications."


So, may I humbly ask again for a list of desktop apps which currently make use of the WOFF format directly? And yes, I mean desktop apps with menus and graphical interfaces used in GNOME, cinnamon, XFCE, KDE for example. 
Presumably the ones who benefit from having WOFF files directly available and registered in a font menu and not accessible via a web-server through @font-face. 
(Not counting ones who already had to implement their own format filtering manually on top of what fontconfig provides like LibreOffice.)

I respectfully think the burden is on you to prove which apps really depend on this choice of WOFF dropped in /usr/share/fonts as opposed to the ones that we currently experimenting problems with. 
IOW you can query UDD for us and report back the findings to the list. Thanks.

How are you going to handle WOFF2 formats going forward? How do we expect every user-facing app in Debian is currently handling WOFF2? 
Do we really expect every font to come with its own fontconfig snippet? 
Or require every app to change its use of the fontconfig API with every new format? That's asking a lot from the upstream maintainers because of a Debian-specific FHS choice.
IMHO that will be unwieldy very quickly. 

We are in the process of getting key software like XeTex to have better filtering of existing formats (and fix breakage there) but I expect it's not the only app that will be faced with a similar issue as new formats arrive and get dropped in.

I'm really keen to hear what others in the pkg-fonts team think. Please chime in. 
Historically this WOFF inclusion approach is very recent and AFAICT only see a handful of packages subscribe to that policy. 

WOFF are really designed to be served up by webservers. Please give me more arguments in favour of breaking that spec and introducing unexpected breakage in apps.
(You have heard of the feedback from the primary XeTex author and WOFF spec author. Surely his perspective is worth listening to.)

Hope that explain. 
Thanks, 

-- 
Nicolas 











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