Control: block 981577 with 981587 I've looked into #981577 a bit more, and i have more thoughts on the fixes i'd proposed earlier:
On Mon 2021-02-01 12:51:12 -0500, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote: > - Bitstream Vera Mono could implement monospaced glyphs for the unicode > box drawing characters Upstream appears to be dead, and the trademark arrangement for Bitstream Vera appears to prohibit a modified font being distributed under the same name without upstream approval. So, I don't think this is a possible fix. It looks to me like distributing Vera as "Bitstream Vera" is problematic for the archive in this way. > - fontconfig could prefer more complete fonts when searching for a > match, which would prioritize dejavu sans (or some other more > complete font) over bitstream vera > > - fontconfig could manually prefer DejaVu Sans Mono over Bitstream Vera > Mono when given the search string "monospace" Either of these approaches point to https://bugs.debian.org/981587 so i'm marking this bug as being blocked on that one. > - chromium, when substituting missing glyphs in a monospace font, could > ensure that the substitute glyphs are appropriately sized for the > font they are filling in for. > > - chromium could hardcode (and depend on?) a preferred monospace font > by default that is more complete than Bistream Vera as its default > monospace font I don't know how to get chromium to do either of these fixes. I'd expect that chromium should just rely on fontconfig directly, but i don't know for sure that this is the case. > - We could drop ttf-bitstream-vera from the archive, which would affect > packages like python-matplotlib-data, gravit-data, and the ~20 other > packages that Depend on ttf-bitstream-vera directly. I can't afford > to just purge the package from my system because i need matplotlib :( the list is smaller now than it used to be but it's not empty: Depends: freewheeling Depends: gearhead2-data Depends: gravit-data Depends: k3d-data (>= 1.10) Depends: libmupen64plus2 Depends: libncarg0 Depends: libprojectm3 Depends: loganalyzer Depends: openmsx-data Depends: python3-django-captcha Depends: r-cran-fontbitstreamvera Depends: setbfree Recommends: librrd8 Recommends: mysql-workbench Recommends: python3-freetype Recommends: vdr Suggests: python3-pygments I could file bug reports against each of these packages asking them to change their dependency from ttf-bitstream-vera to fonts-dejavu-core, or at least depend on "fonts-dejavu-core | ttf-bitstream-vera" That would make it easier to drop ttf-bitstream-vera from the archive in the future, but of course there are still documents out there that refer to ttf-bitstream-vera explicitly. It seems likely that users will want to have the package directly installed (or even pull it from an old archive if we drop it in the new one). If it's installed (even from outside the archive), then the same problem comes up, so this doesn't seem like a particularly robust fix. Furthermore, ttf-bitstream-vera (probably due to its weak character coverage) is only 600KiB, while fonts-dejavu-core is nearly 3MiB. This suggests that a minimalist debian system with limited character requirements is likely to want to use Bitstream Vera just due to size constraints. Probably, debian will be obliged to distribute ttf-bitstream-vera in its current unchanged form indefinitely :/ > - fonts-dejavu-core (or fonts-dejavu-extra?) could Provide: > ttf-bitstream-vera, since it appears to provide aliases for Bitstream > Vera in e.g. /etc/fonts/conf.avail/57-dejavu-sans-mono.conf -- i > don't know whether this is sufficient for all the explicit > Dependencies of ttf-bitstream-vera, though. This doesn't seem to be sufficient for all users of fonts. I tested it with Libreoffice. When i have an .odt file with a stylesheet that references "Bitstream Vera Sans", libreoffice renders the text from DejaVu Sans, but it indicates in its font dropdown box that Bitstream Vera Sans is not installed: the font name shows up in the dropdown box in italics, the way that other missing fonts appear. Given the above analysis, i think this problem will need to be fixed in fontconfig, maybe by fixing #981587. --dkg
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