Hi all,

Since Fedora 11 Alpha is quickly approaching, here is a much-delayed edition of the fonts SIG irregular status report.

I should probably have done one for Fedora 10 release, but (silly me) expected then that the new font packaging guidelines would be adopted quickly. After all, they only reworded existing rules and added material already presented and discussed on the fonts and devel lists.

Of course various instances decided to celebrate F10 by taking a break, then there was some bike-shedding, then we had the Christmas vacations, then FUDCON and more bike-shedding. Live and learn. At least after being hammered to death the result is clear and clean.

Anyway, to the report.

◾◾◾ New fonts packaging guidelines ◾◾◾

After much anguish and unexpected developments FPC and FESCO approved the complete set of fonts packaging changes that we had submitted. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-January/msg00007....

The end result is: — a completed and clarified policy page http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:FontsPolicy

— two new packaging templates http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Simple_fonts_spec_template http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fonts_spec_template_for_multiple_fonts

— and a helper package with rpm macros, documentation, plus fontconfig and spec templates http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_fonts_policy_package

◾◾◾ Distribution-wide font auditing and repackaging ◾◾◾

Some innocent repoqueries revealed a distressing number of source packages (>130) that made us ship fonts while completely ignoring our previous fonts packaging guidelines and existing licensing rules. So applying new font guidelines twists quickly turned into distribution-wide operation.

— Its advancement is now tracked in: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=477044

— A (long) FAQ was published to help packagers with no fonts experience: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Shipping_fonts_in_Fedora_(FAQ)

— To make sure documentation, QA and other groups are aware and help implement the changes they've been proposed as a Fedora 11 feature: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Repackaging_of_Fedora_fonts

◾◾◾ Wishlist status ◾◾◾

Our wishlist stood at 56 entries for last report. It has now reached the 76 entries watermark. The current fonts packagers are clearly unable to cope with Fedora demands, fresh blood is needed before it moves into 3-digits land.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Font_wishlist

At the same time the respected lwn.net is running a front page article listing more indispensable free or open fonts, some of them being neither in Fedora nor in our wishlist yet.

http://lwn.net/Articles/315872/ (subscription required right now, will go free in less than a week)

Volunteers to package those or at least add them to our wishlist would be welcome. The free and open font landscape is really moving now, and the quality and breadth of its font offerings is now a distribution differentiator.

◾◾◾ Review status ◾◾◾

At this time there are no un-reviewed font packages in Fedora bugzilla. However, several reviews have been open for quite a long time with their requesters not acting on review comments.

Please do respond to review comments. Reviewing packages is tedious ungrateful work and getting no response after one is demotivating.

◾◾◾ New packages ◾◾◾

Ignoring renamings ctan-musixtex-fonts, dustin-dustismo-roman-fonts, dustin-dustismo-sans-fonts, hanazono-fonts, google-droid-sans-fonts, google-droid-sans-mono-font, google-droid-serif-fonts, serafettin-cartoon-fonts, and unikurd-web-font are now available in the repository.

The most user-visible of those are probably the Droid fonts, but Dustimo had been waited for a long time.

Several other fonts previously hidden deep inside apps have now been exposed as part of the ongoing F11 auditing and repackaging. The complete set of changes is documented as usual: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fonts_inclusion_history

Several new packagers worked on those and on other packages not pushed yet and I want to thank them publicly for their contribution to a better Fedora.

◾◾◾ Web font surveys ◾◾◾

Fedora 10 shipped with an openjdk plugin that should be complete enough to run web font surveys. There is no reason left for Fedora users not to participate in them, and help web designers select fonts that work well with Fedora browsers. Please take the time to run those:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Linux_fonts_on_the_web:_CSS_and_font_surveys

◾◾◾ Better fonts whiteboard ◾◾◾

The desktop team has added a whiteboard page to the wiki to help identify the software changes needed to improve Fedora fonts and text handling.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/BetterFonts

Please contribute comments and complements to this page to help Fedora get better.

◾◾◾ Font autoinstallation ◾◾◾

Rumors on irc are that the feature is advancing fast. Hopefully we'll have finished cleaning up our font packages before they need to be rebuild to add auto-install metadata. Automating this operation requires clean packages free of historic cruft.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/AutomaticFontInstallation

And that's all for this issue, thank you for reading it to its end.

Regards,