hi Nicolas

As we discussed last time, I've sent email asking for official confirmation and clarifications of the license in the font metadata. I am now waiting to hear back from them (message attached).

The Han glyphs in Droid fallback pretty much follow the Han-unification as in the unicode documentations. That means they look very much close to what Chinese mainland users preferred. The style is Heiti, which is like ttf-wqy-zenhei and is essentially a sans-serif style. There are 16,502 Hanzi in the CJK basic block, which is the union of GB2312 and Big5 charsets. Because this font is targeted at memory-limited devices, there are 15,524 Han glyphs were composed by references, the rest are stand-alone outline glyphs which can not be decomposed into components. It contains no embedded bitmaps, but the outline quality is very good. I believe most zh_* users will be very happy if this font will be used as desktop font (the current zh_* font on Fedora is wqy-bitmapfont which is also using the Han-unification forms). It may be a little bit difficult for Japanese and Korean users though.

As this font does not provide the full coverage to all CJK glyphs, in the mean time, I believe the current national standards and regulations in mainland China prefer GBK (same as CJK unified ideographs), or even GB18030 (CJK basic+CJK Ext. A) coverage, so, I've planned to extend this font to at least GBK charset. That means to complete about 4500 glyphs. I and a friend are now working on an online tool to allow people to compose new glyphs from existing Droid components. It is almost working, you can browse the following link for a sample output: (need to view with firefox 3.x)

http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?ViewGlyph#SFD/Droid/%E8%85%AA

the GUI is at http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?BezierGlyph but it only has Chinese instructions so far.

Once the license is sorted out, we will start promoting this project among the Chinese users, and make our way toward a more complete CJK font with this extension. I also planned to look into the reference glyphs and seek the possibility of further compression of the font. Similar to the current ttf-wqy-zenhei settings, Chinese users will also be happy to see a mono-spaced face co-existing with the regular face in ttc form.

Qianqian

Joe Onorato wrote:

Hi Qianqian,

I'll follow up with the people responsible for fonts.

-joe

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Qianqian Fang <fangqq@gmail.com mailto:fangqq@gmail.com> wrote:

hi Joe

A few weeks ago, I posted a question on android-discussion group,
asking about the droid font licenses:

http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss/browse_thread/thread/3c60867cab66e23d/ab69c3174b63ca4c?lnk=gst&q=font#ab69c3174b63ca4c
<http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss/browse_thread/thread/3c60867cab66e23d/ab69c3174b63ca4c?lnk=gst&q=font#ab69c3174b63ca4c>

I really appreciate your feedback and confirmation on the license
matter.

As I am an maintainer for an open-source font project, I also
maintain a few CJKV font packages for Fedora. Recently, I
mentioned my plan of making derived fonts from Droid
font family at fedora's font list, the people in charge appeared
to be very careful, and warned me to obtain a more "official"
clarification on the license before taking further actions. You
can see our discussions at

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-fonts-list/2008-November/msg00009.html

We both felt that the best way to make the clarifications is to state
it in the metadata section of the font, there are dedicated
"License Description"
and "License Info URL" fields in the name table to specify the
font licenses:

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/opentype/index_name.html

I am wondering if it is possible for android team to update the font
files and clarify the licenses. In this way, people's confusion on
the fonts
and the sdk package will completely go away.

If you or your team member do have the plan to make this
change, I would be appreciated if you can let me know when
the updated fonts are pushed into svn, so I can mobilize my
team to start planned works around these fonts.

thank you so much for your time and looking forward to your reply.

Qianqian

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

Hi,

As you probably know Google has released a Droid font set as part of its Android platform. While the font licensing is being clarified https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=472635 (Fedora packaging blocker) I've taken a quick look at the font files.

The set includes a huge "Droid Sans Fallback" font with CJK coverage. Could the CJK folks take a look at it and tell me how this font should be treated: as Japanese-only, Chinese-only, Korean-only before/after current CJK defaults, etc? Han unification means someone will probably not be happy about it.

I've uploaded preliminary droid packages there http://nim.fedorapeople.org/fontpackages/

so people can check them out.

Regards,

---

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