Christian, On Feb 12, 2008 8:27 AM, Christian Perrier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > (not sure that I can write to -bugs, hence CC'ing you) > > Quoting Steve White ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > > Hi, > > > > Now that Freefont is in synch with Debian ttf-freefont, what's next? > > > > Well, I applied one outstanding patch that had never been applied. > > As near as I can tell, this is the last of the outstanding patches. > > Are there bugs that are still opened in the old bug tracking system of > Primoz? I don't remember many and the most recent ones were opened by > /me with the Debian maintainer hat. > If you mean the Freefont bug tracking system...yes, 25 or so. And somebody submitted another yesterday. I've found several that are really problems.
Also, I want to double-check that what was fixed by the applied patches, was really fixed: I have my doubts about a couple. The worst is that kerning is not working in many applications. I have investigated this, and found that it is a complicated issue (see the bug report). This really has to be fixed before we proceed. It is crucial that the font be on the whole, usable, for its main purposes. Right now it's lacking badly in several aspects. But first, I have to get it working with a recent Fontforge. I have alerted the Fontforge maintainers of the problem. > Next steps would then be thinking about enhancing the font. Roughly, > two choices can be made: > > - continue the run for Unicode ranges completeness by filling in gaps > (that implies finding designed glyphs) > One guy already wrote me about some glyphs in some Indian ranges. Some of them look usable. As I said, my personal thrust is going to be technical symbols, mostly for mathematics. > - polish the current glyphs with better hinting, better general look, > etc. > > ...two tasks, indeed, which I don't have any clue about, though..:) > I am also curious about the hinting. Many glyphs seem to be hand-hinted -- the auto-hint feature of FontForge gives completely different results. And they sometimes turn out to be hinted badly. So...what are the guidelines for hinting by hand, or for using the auto-hint feature? I have similar questions about kerning... If somebody could point me to documents explaining the algorithms used for hinting and kerning, I would appreciate it very much. I'm just guessing now. I also want to draw up some policies, regarding the general direction of the effort, submission of changes, style guidelines, etc. (For those readers who are rolling their eyes at this point: This is not just to be legalistic--the intent is to avoid conflict and confusion that would be counterproductive to the effort, by providing a point of reference.) Well, lots to do.
