Talk:L10N/Tasks/Ro fonts

Nim made the following comments:

• Any remainning Type 1 font we ship is effectively a walking corpse waitting for proper burial for this and many similar reasons (Type 1 fonts are an i18n mess). Trying to have them survive little longer is not helping anyone. That just sets the stage for the next i18n workaround. You need to tell your users they have to drop Type1 fonts or set up a maintenance project (that starts by converting them to a modern format like OTF)

Converting fonts to OpenType is a non-trivial endeavor. I don't see Fedora no longer shipping the core PostScript fonts anytime soon. Vga 21:47, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

It's that simple: either someone cares enough to convert and fix them or they'll be dropped. People could not imagine we would ever drop Luxi and look what happened. NicolasMailhot 22:09, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

• We don't care about non-modifiable fonts. Fedora should not ship any of those.

I know people that paid thousands of dollars for quality type-1 fonts. And they work very well with TeX under Linux. You are effectively telling them that they should repurchase (for thousands more) the OpenType variants of those fonts if they want to use them with pango or OOo ICU. Absurd. Vga 21:47, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, too bad for them, I know people who paid thousands for specialised internationalized typewriters that started collecting dust a few years later as PCs and laser printers became available. It's a mistake to think writing technology is static, purchasing fonts with no update plan is a bad investment, and Type 1 is just the latest format to die. NicolasMailhot 22:09, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, people that have that kind of money are the ones buying Redhat's corporate products thus supporting this site. Fedora ships wine and samba, doesn't it? Following your "we don't care about interoperability with commercial products" attitude fedoraproject.org is going to end up on a server in somebody's basement... Let's not start a flamewar over this. Vga 10:04, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

It's not a flamewar. You're free to fix old broken Type1 fonts if you like (where the "fix" is usually conversion to a non-broken format), but don't expect any support for "fixes" that have fallout outside Type1 fonts and break correctness for modern clean fonts. NicolasMailhot 16:33, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

I do agree with you that Type-1 is a dying format. But here is a quote from Adobe's Thomas Phinney: "So, from a technical perspective, Type 1 is a thoroughly obsolete format. However, that doesn't mean we'll stop supporting it tomorrow or anything." Vga 10:16, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

This was written in 2005. It's very possible this tomorrow is not so distant anymore. And as the author writes himself in his article Adobe's support does not extend to fixing all the apps which are likely to drop support from Type1, and even for the apps Adobe supports directly he expects problems to become more and more usual (in 2005, we're 3 years later now, several IT ages later. NicolasMailhot 16:33, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

• The Locl bit does not seem so clear-cut 455981.

Thanks for pointing this out. I wrote a longer comment on that bug page. Vga 21:47, 19 July 2008 (UTC)