Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Fonts project meeting and elections

[Guilherme Amadio]

Hello!

On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 03:45:23PM +0800, Ben de Groot wrote:
> On 22 February 2015 at 03:43, Ben de Groot <yngwin@g.o> wrote:
> > To anyone within Gentoo who is interested in fonts
> >
> > I would like to announce a meeting to be held in #gentoo-meetings on
> > Freenode, on Friday February 27 at 06:00 UTC, unless another date
> > and/or time will be suggested by people who want to attend.
>
> Since nobody actually showed up, here is what I've decided and am proposing:

Oops, got caught up by the timezone difference... Sorry about that.
It was late at night here, but yesterday.

>
> 1. lu_zero, matsuu, pva: do you still want to be members of the Fonts
> project? Then add yourselves to the new project page:
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Fonts

I'm listed, but why can I not edit the page? I'd like to be able to.

>
> 2. Since aballier voted for me, and there were no other nominations,
> we default to me becoming the lead.
>
> 3. Handling of fonts with both truetype and opentype variants, as
> brought up in https://bugs.gentoo.org/406301#c8
> Since OpenType is an extension of TrueType, and superior for desktop
> and printing use, I propose that we prefer installing just OpenType.
> But this should be user configurable, so in those cases I propose we
> do:
>
> IUSE="+opentype"
> if use opentype; then
>     FONT_SUFFIX="otf"
> else
>     FONT_SUFFIX="ttf"
> fi

Both this and the use expand suggested by Luca seem good methods.
I also suggest we prefer OpenType over TrueType whenever possible.

>
> 4. Project member should have a look at font bugs.
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=media-fonts has a lot
> of low hanging fruit: version bumps, dead homepages, etc. Also some
> good new packages.

I've seen a few of those and suggested webpages for a couple of them.
I can go fix some of these if nobody else does.

> 5. Some fonts have webfont variants (WOFF is the important one here).
> This may be useful for users doing web development. What are your
> thoughts on installing those (conditionally, toggled by useflag)?

Since this is mostly used for web developers, I recommend to leave it
off for desktop users, but possibly on for servers, for example.

>
> Anything else you want to discuss?
>

I'd like to suggest that we do not name new font packages font-*, but
simply by the name of the typeface, such as open-sans, source-pro, etc.
There is Source Serif, Source Sans, and Source Han Sans that are not
packaged yet (see https://github.com/adobe-fonts for more info), as well
as many other nice and well-known typefaces and icon fonts such as
Aller, Amble, Casper, Clear Sans, Entypo, Font Awesome, Signika, Comic
Neue, Fira, Nexa, Exo, Nobile, Open Sans, etc.

There is also the really nice Input (http://input.fontbureau.com), but
its license is only free for personal use, so we may need to talk to its
designer to see if we can package it at all. I'm using it on my laptop,
and it's a pleasure to read and very customizable.

Well, maybe opening a #gentoo-fonts on IRC will be a nice way to
coordinate our efforts.

Also, this is definitely a minor thing, but all designers prefer the
term typeface to font when referring to typefaces, so they'd probably be
happy if media-fonts became media-type, or something similar. The
distinction is that the set of fonts (regular, light, bold, condensed,
etc) is what makes a typeface, which is the general style of all fonts
in the set. Anyway, just food for thought.

Best,
—Guilherme