Hi Dave,
Thanks for the quick answer!
On 15 July 2012 21:42, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot(a)laposte.net>
wrote:
> A. I used a few hundred MiBs of Android git checkout as source.
That's the canonical source for Droid, yes.
(The Roboto fonts in that repo has another canonical source,
http://developer.android.com/design/style/typography.html)
Well that's one of the unhelpful Google web sites. Its zip informs you:
"You may use the materials in this file without restriction to develop
your apps and to use in your apps."
I haven't the faintest idea what that means legally. If I was mad enough
to package another set of Google fonts, I'd source Roboto from android git
like Droid, where it is clearly tagged with the Apache license.
> its relationship with android as upstream is unclear
They are separate projects and while formally have the same parent
company, they may as well be different companies with no relationship
beyond their libre license.
Nice clarification! (I suspected as much but the VCS histories were
unclear on when and why changes were propagated from one to the other)
> C. I tried to dispatch the Arabic variants in the Latin family
they were
> designed to complement, but I may have misunderstood the design info
> available online.
Please clarify 'dispatch' :-)
Kufi with Sans (masquerading as the Arabic block of Droid Sans) and Naskh
with Serif the same way (see the long fontconfig ruleset I referenced)
http://www.29arabicletters.com/foundry/?m=1-1-1&fid=26
states Naskh was designed to complement Serif
and
https://code.google.com/p/chromium-os/issues/detail?id=17382
that chromium uses Kufi with Sans
> E. If the package description does not correctly attribute the
main
> designers involved, please educate me and I'll correct it.
I'll see if I can find out more about this.
That would be appreciated. I only found descriptions for the new Arabic
fonts.
> F. I've zapped DroidSansFallbackFull DroidSansFallbackLegacy
> DroidSansArabic DroidNaskh-Regular-SystemUI that seemed redundant. If
> they
> provide something missing in the other files, please tell me what it is
> and I'll fix the packages.
The Fallback fonts have CJK glyphs and others character ranges not
found in the other fonts. The Legacy one can probably be forgotten.
I should have indicated I kept DroidSansFallback (no idea if it's missing
something important compared to DroidSansFallbackFull and
DroidSansFallbackLegacy)
The UI variants have adjusted vertical metrics to fit the Android
UI's
vertical space limitations.
Ok that means they can be ignored on a desktop.
Thanks for the useful information!
Best regards,
--
Nicolas Mailhot