[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#703456: Please add Nafees Nastaleeq

[Christian PERRIER]

Quoting Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj at ubuntu.com):

> > BTW, if you haven't noticed yet, there are significant issues with the
> > licensing of this font that still need fixing (it's sadly a non-standard
> > mishmash of licenses with little coherence, legal validity or practical
> > use cases:
> > http://www.cle.org.pk/software/license/Nafees_Nastaleeq_License.html So
> > I would expect our ftpmasters to seriously frown on this and reject
> > it!).
> 
> Well, please let me remind of the fact that another font with the very
> same license is packaged in fonts-nafees and has been in the Debian
> archive for 8 years. Consequently it would be pretty inconsistent to
> reject a request to add Nafees Nastaleeq, wouldn't it?

Well, if the Nafees Web font doesn't have a proper license, then it is
a bug and, yes, there are bugs that aren't discovered for a very long
time...:-)

That's why SIL introduced the SIL license, which should really be
adopted by all those fonts designed in various language promotion
organizations such as CLE....

Sadly, quite often, discussions with these upstream don't show any big
interest from them to make things clearer wrt the fotns (and other
stuff they provide).

> There are other Nastaleeq fonts. For instance, from the discussion at
> the related Ubuntu bug I understand that some Urdu users would prefer
> Jameel Noori Nastaleeq over Nafees Nastaleeq.
> 
> http://www.ffonts.net/Jameel-Noori-Nastaleeq.font

That reminds me many discussions with many localizers : each prefer
their own font (or keyboard mapping or whatever) and it's very hard
for those who coordinate i18n in distros to have a good figure.

Obviously none of us is in good position to decide what is a good font
to represent Urdu (except that Urdu is certainly one of the most
complex Arabic script languages when it comes at combinations,
ligatures, etc.) --> it mixes the sense of details for calligraphy
from both the Arabic script culture and the one from the Indic scripts
cultures....and, believe me, both are very picky when it comes at
calligraphy...:-)


> 
> The ttf files included in the zip that can be downloaded from there have
> this embedded copyright notice:
> 
> "This Font Is Free Of Charge For Urdu Lovers"
> 
> Suppose that wouldn't make the ftpmasters feel more comfortable. ;)
> 
> I get the impression that the FOSS concept isn't well established in
> Pakistan. Let's not be too picky about licenses while trying to change that.


That's a very common problem with fonts, sadly : imprecise licenses,
mysterious build paths and very vague release processes....

Let's first decide about Nafees Nastaleeq....

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