Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
I'd like know what people think of setting up a font SIG
I think it is a great idea!
3. I don't believe our font selection is optimal for every
locale. It
took a near-revolt by our Greek users to get their situation fixed in
Fedora Core 6, and there are probably many other problem locales,
where users just pass on Fedora or bear their pain silently instead of
telling us about problems.
True.
4. The i18n team is nominally in charge of selecting the best fonts
for each locale, but does not always have the right local contacts to
do so. So far i18n has focused on technical problems : if your locale
needs complex IM methods you have i18n visibility, if your locale
poses no technical challenge but your default fonts are suboptimal the
i18n team may not notice you.
Right and we are currently working hard moving all the fonts in our
generic fonts-* to separate packages with their upstream names.
I believe there is enough interest in the various Fedora groups to
improve the current situation through a font SIG.
Yes.
This SIG would be tasked with:
A. providing a single point of entry for Fedora people interested in
fonts, centralizing all our packaging rules or at least indexing them
in a single place
B. completing the existing font packaging documentation
C. helping the i18n team maintain the font install list for each locale
D. identifying fonts worthy of packaging for l10n or art reasons
E. identifying problems in existing font packages and helping relay
the info upstream
F. identifying problems in our font infrastructure, packaging
necessary font tools
G. coordinating and effectively packaging new fonts
Looks good to me.
The l10n and i18n groups are naturals for (C). We just have to steal
the Debian receipe of having a font-by-locale table in our wiki.
Yes
Note that doing the legal
analysis of a potential font is far from easy as font licensing
practices are far less clean than software licensing practices. Also
we should try to build font from sources whenever possible, but font
building is often a mess.
That is right - the legal side is more often harder than the packaging
and reviewing.
G will demand packagers and reviewers. By nature most of them will
be
active in other Fedora forums, so we're not talking of a few full-time
SIG members but a lot of part-time contributors.
Right, I guess this will be the main visible fruit of the SIG's efforts,
which will provide good font packaging standards, guidelines and
examples as you say.
I created a mockup wiki page to try to make all this clear
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/NicolasMailhot/FontMatrix
Cool
So, who wants to play? Is Fedora ready for a font SIG or should I
ask
again next year?
I'm in. :) I think we need this sonner rather than later. Probably a
bit late to make an impact on F8 but certainly we can start preparing
now for F9.
Thanks for the initiative!
Jens