[Pkg-fonts-devel] How to deal with fontlint warnings? (Was: font checking tools?)

[Gioele Barabucci]

On 17/11/2015 14:33, Paul Wise wrote:
> One of the things it has checks for is fonts.
> So far it runs fontlint, ftvalid and ftlint.

Hi,

I was wondering: when does it make sense to check fonts? At packaging
time or at installation time?

It looks like check-all-the-things is meant to be used by packagers
(like lintian) and not as an automated integration test (think autopkgtest).

So my question is: what should a maintainer do when they see that the
various checks produce warnings or report errors?

Practical example: I am adopting the ttf-radisnoir package. Upstream is
gone, the fonts are available only as OTF/TTF (no other source formats,
probably they never existed) but the font is nice and worth having. Now
fontlint reports various problems:

    $ fontlint RadisSans-medium.otf
    Copyright (c) 2000-2011 by George Williams.
     Executable based on sources from 13:48 GMT 22-Feb-2011-ML.
     Library based on sources from 13:48 GMT 22-Feb-2011.
    Warning: Mac and Windows entries in the 'name' table differ for the
      Fullname string in the language English (US)
      Mac String: Radis Sans Medium
      Windows String: RadisSans-Medium
    Validation RadisSans-Medium ...Failed
      Self Intersecting Glyph
      Wrong Direction
      Missing Points at Extrema
      Overlapping hints in a glyph.
      Bad BlueScale entry in PostScript Private dictionary

What should the (wanna be) package maintainer do?

Directly fix the changes? Doable, but how are the modifications meant to
be stored? Inside the OTF files? No patches?

Or should the packager convert the font to sfd, do the changes, generate
the patches and write in debian/rules a sfd-to-otf recompilation step?

Suggestions are very welcome.

Cheers,

--
Gioele Barabucci <gioele at svario.it>