Opened 7 years ago
Closed 7 years ago
#8802 closed enhancement (fixed)
Replace the pages for oxygen fonts and Noto fonts with links to the TTF-and-OTF page.
| Reported by: | Owned by: | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | normal | Milestone: | 8.0 |
| Component: | BOOK | Version: | SVN |
| Severity: | normal | Keywords: | |
| Cc: |
Description
At the moment, the TTF and OTF fonts page has some details for the fonts used by KDE. Replace that by separate entries for Oxygen and Noto, archive the separate pages, and link to the specific fonts in kde / plasma.
In the past, I can remember raising a ticket that the Oxygen fonts no longer needed to be compiled because TTF files were already shipped. But I can't find that ticket. I do recall that I noticed the md5sums for shipped and compiled differ.
Over the last month I have spent some time looking at these fonts. After discovering a number of other libre fonts where the authors clearly felt that shipping source was important, I concluded that these were in the same category.
The TTF file format contains a number of tables. The shipped version of the file is larger, with more tables, and 'strings' shows the embedded information about authorship and licensing is arranged differently. I surmise that is because either it was compiled on a different platform, or it used an earlier version of fontforge.
I also noted that in my own backups of versions I had compiled, the sizes differed slightly. Using 'strings' I discovered that the date of compilation is held within the file, which accounts for that difference, but also that one or two other bytes which could be regarded as text by 'strings' sometimes differed.
I now feel strongly that there is nothing to be gained by wasting cycles compiling the oxygen fonts - users on other OS's can just install the TTFs, and since we do the same thing for all other fonts I see no reason to require KDE builders to install fontforge.
For Noto fonts, the outline details in the TTF and OTF fonts page are pretty much adequate. Maybe suggest that people using Noto might wish to tune fontconfig to add aliases for any additional Noto fonts they installed, so that if Noto Sans is asked for and the required codepoint is provided by a different Noto font, that other font will be used.
Actioned at r18221, old pages archived at r18222