https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161941

Caolán McNamara <[email protected]> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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     Ever confirmed|0                           |1
           Assignee|[email protected] |[email protected]
                   |desktop.org                 |om
             Status|UNCONFIRMED                 |ASSIGNED

--- Comment #30 from Caolán McNamara <[email protected]> ---
The dev mailing list is probably a better place than a bugzilla issue for a
general discussion as to whether we need processes to gatekeep what gets added
by contributors either generally or just specifically for fonts.

But on a few pieces:

wrt 'This would not meaningfully help us with font replacement as MSO users do
not get these fonts bundled with MSO', FWIW there is a "Cloud fonts list"
section at
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cloud-fonts-in-office-f7b009fe-037f-45ed-a556-b5fe6ede6adb
which lists the fonts that are available to Microsoft 365 subscribers, and
lists Agency FB, Baskerville Old Face, etc. There's also some related content
at
https://designtopresent.com/2024/06/20/a-guide-to-cloud-fonts-in-microsoft-office-365/

'Is the "Google DocRepair project" an active effort we need to participate in?'
I don't know of anything existing in LibreOffice that definitely fits there.
There is the OpenSymbol font I suppose, but that's about it. I guess using that
as a source to generate replacements for some Microsoft dingbat fonts is maybe
plausible, but I don't think there was any serious effort to metrically match
anything (except StarBats) when glyphs were added to OpenSymbol, but I don't
know for sure.

FWIW https://fonts.google.com/?query=The+DocRepair+Project is another useful
link to see these fonts.

'if the clients of companies have signalled a need for replacement fonts or
what other motivators there could be for shipping them.' The triggering
sequence is more along the line of Collabora initially exploring what options
exist for replacements of the relatively new contemporary MSOffice fonts and
discovering that these other fonts exist along the way. Useful fonts to improve
layout compatibility are a rare find, and to come across 7 all at once is
exciting, even if they are not ultra-tier "pre selected as document default"
fonts.

'we don't have anyone arguing that the commit is beneficial and thus justified'
FWIW I think any fonts like these that help improve compatibility are a good
thing. I have no numbers to indicate if it's a marginal improvement or a
significant one but I think it is generally beneficial

Anyhow, what I'll do is to merge https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/172337
to make bundling these docrepair fonts optional at build time, and default that
to off. And we can make mention of it at the next ESC as to if that's the right
default. (FWIW none of this typically affects the packages available through
Linux distributions. which generally build --without-fonts to use the fonts
packaged by the distro instead. So this affects what the standalone non-distro
packages contain)

If something like bug 159950 ever gets done then that's another future option
of course, especially if we end up a a good place with hundreds of
compatibility fonts. (On a technical note there, for the linux case we do have
a certain ability to detect what fonts are missing from a document and request
their installation from packagekit, but in practice we only do this for
ultimate glyph fallback where there are no fonts available to render in a given
language and just query for something that can render text in that language)

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