[Pkg-fonts-devel] UW ttyp0 - a multiscript monospaced bitmap font family

Bjørn Mork bjorn at mork.no
Wed Jul 13 11:43:38 UTC 2016


uwe at mpi-inf.mpg.de writes:

> Dear Debian Fonts Task Force,
>
> I have released a new series of monospaced bitmap fonts. They cover
> most of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet, Greek, Armenian, Georgian (only
> Mkhedruli), Hebrew (without cantillation marks), Thai, most of IPA (but
> no UPA), standard punctuation, common symbols, some mathematics, line
> graphics and a few dingbats (about 3000 Unicode characters).
> There are nine sizes from 11px to 22px in regular and bold; in some
> sizes there is also an italic version.
>
> The license is an MIT license with name change clause similar to the
> Bitstream Vera License (a bit more permissive, actually).
>
> The source code (including documentation) and some font samples can
> be found at http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~uwe/misc/uw-ttyp0/. If you are
> interested in including UW ttyp0 in Debian, drop me a note.
>
> Regards
>
> Uwe Waldmann

Hello Uwe and Debian font developers,

I found this email from back in Aug 2012 and wonder what happened here?
Did it just fall through the cracks?  Or was there just a resource
problem - someone needs to do the packaging work?  Or  was there
something else that made this request go unanswered?

The reason I ask is that I just went through the usual hoops
reconfiguring fonts after getting a new laptop with insanely better
resolution that the previous one. One of the most challenging tasks was
finding a usable font for xterms, because I do want to use xterms on
machines with few or no fonts installed at all.  So I was pretty much
forced to use X11 bitmap fonts. And they are all ugly and/or
unreadable. Except for the UW ttyp0 family, which actually is quite
nice, Nice enough that it should really be the Debian default for
xterms, if you ask me.

Anyway, one of the reasons I used a lot of time searching for usable
fonts was that I started with the set available in Debian sid, in the
belief that this would include all the good fonts out there. That's
usually how Debian packages works, thanks to all the hard working Debian
developers.

So I was a bit surprised when I found that Debian lacked what I consider
the deinitely best choice.  In my opinion, UW ttyp0 is the best
monospaced bitmap font family out there. And I'm not alone in that view,
since I foud it by googling for good font recommendations. The license
also seems to be acceptable, although IANAL.  And there has been a
request from the font designer to have it included in Debian.

So where did this go wrong?


Bjørn (confused)



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