Features/Liberation Fonts 2

Liberation_Fonts_2

Summary

The Liberation(tm) Fonts is a font family which aims at metric compatibility with Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New. Enhanced version 2.0 of Liberation fonts provides more script coverage, better license and improved hinting.

Owner

• Name: Pravin Satpute

• Email: psatpute@redhat.com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 18
• Last updated: 2012-08-14
• Percentage of completion: 100%
  • Package now available in rawhide (2012-07-30)
  • No blocker present

Detailed Description

Liberation fonts is one of the important font in Fedora distribution.

• Provides metric compatibility with Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New fonts of Microsoft Windows platform.
• Default fonts in Libre Office.

Issues:

• Existing License of liberation fonts is complex.
• Over the last couple of years we have RFE's to increase coverage of Liberation fonts to support more scripts.
  • "RFE: Add Greek Polytonic support to Liberation fonts" #473842
  • "Serbian glyphs for Wikipedia" #657849
• We are noticing some tricky Hinting issues. #591554, #591556, #606217 #768067, #768067

Solution:

• Upstream latest release 2.00.0 based on google croscore fonts resolves all these issues.

Benefit to Fedora

• Liberation fonts-2.00.0 is as per Fedora project recommended OFL license.
• Provide more character covarage.
  • Latest Version - Older Version
  • 2302 (sans) - 667
  • 2274 (mono) - 666
  • 2303 (serif) - 662
• It provides support for Greek Polytonic characters. Bug open for this as a RFE.
• Improved hinting.

Scope

• Upstream release based on croscore fonts.
• Package liberation-narrow-sans as a different package in Fedora. Since licensing issues still not fixed for Liberation Sans Narrow
• Build latest liberation fonts 2.00.0 for Rawhide
• Testing and bugfixing

How To Test

• Install liberation fonts 2.00.0 version
• Observe differences from earlier version.
• Check rendering of your test in Libre Office.

User Experience

• Improved character coverage.
• Better hinting effect.

Dependencies

• Feature owner is leading upstream Liberation fonts project.
• Package review of liberation-narrow-fonts #840878

Contingency Plan

• Need to see first testing reports from users after packaging latest version in Fedora rawhide/18.
• If users reporting major problems for against improved version. We can roll back to older version of Liberation fonts. 1.07.2

Documentation

• Liberation font upstream

Release Notes

• Improved version of Liberation fonts providing more coverage and better hinting.

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/Liberation_Fonts_2