[Pkg-fonts-devel] GNU FreeFont 20120503 released

[Fabian Greffrath]

Hi Steve,

it is some time ago that you educated us about an issue with new
developments in fontforge and freetype with regard to monospaced fonts.
Do you think this is the same reason why the colleagues from the
liberation fonts introduced the following change using fonttool?

http://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/liberation-fonts.git/commit/?id=70efa453a1489b8a9c5c128d769808e9b409fcd4

 - Fabian


Am Freitag, den 08.06.2012, 22:48 +0200 schrieb Steve White:
> Hi Christian and Fabian,
> 
> I wanted to apprise you of a recent change to FreeType, that will have
> some effect on FreeFont sometime soon.
> 
> It only affects FreeMono, and (I think) only in the accuracy with
> which the letters are spaced.
> 
> The deal is, due to a disagreement between people working on
> FontForge, regarding the interpretation of
> the standards, a flag is turned off.  This used to only affect Windows
> applications, but now it affects Linux too.
> I built the font with a modified version of FontForge, which (I
> believe correctly) sets the flag.
> I submitted the patch to FontForge, and expected it would be implemented soon.
> But others have objected (for reasons whose explanation still escapes
> me).   So the patch isn't in.
> 
> It isn't a *big* deal, but it will mean your built binaries will be
> different from the ones in the FreeFont release
> in this regard, and in some applications will behave differently.
> Under FreeType with patches from 2011-04-21,
> the built versions of FreeMono will not render as well as the binaries
> downloaded from the FreeFont site,
> because FontForge will not have set this flag.
> 
> I'm thinking of other options, but nothing looks easy at this point.
> 
> Cheers!
>