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

[Gioele Barabucci]

On 21/11/2015 14:51, Paul Wise wrote:
>> At packaging time or at installation time?
> 
> Installation time wouldn't make much sense as it is too late to do
> anything about it.

Well, sometimes it makes sense. Suppose for a second that libfreetype is
used for 100% of the font pipeline, from opening and reading the files
to generating the bitmaps to be sent to the display. If you have
integration tests (a la autopkgtest) in every font, then, when you want
to update libfreetype, you can check whether this update breaks any font
somehow: either the tables are not read properly or in your architecture
the sub-pixel hinting is wrong. At that point you can chose to skip that
update. You can do this only if you have tests integrated in the each
font package.

But we digress. Back to the main point,

> Modifying OTF files in an automatic way is fraught with problems and I
> would leave any fixes to upstream, but if you really really wanted to
> do it then a FontForge Python script might work, but keep in mind
> FontForge in Debian is very outdated and FontForge has a poor
> reputation with font designers.

I understand that. But my counter question is: how you do intend to
proceed with fonts that incorrectly have their embedding bits set?
Asking the upstream to fix the files and re-release or changing directly
the OTF/TTF files?

Cheers,

--
Gioele Barabucci <gioele at svario.it>