[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Typography

[Sveinn í Felli]

Þann mán 21.maí 2012 10:11, skrifaði Mirek M.:
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> So I'd like to ask: What are the requirements for a font to
> be shipped with LibreOffice? Are all of the open-source font
> licenses compatible with our licensing? How many additional
> fonts (in addition to Liberation fonts or the Chrome OS
> fonts) could we ship?
> 
> I realize that there will be some compatibility problems as
> there always are. Down the line, I'd like us to partner with
> other open-source projects and either agree on a set of
> quality open-source fonts that every piece of FLOSS software
> should support (right now, the debate centers around Times,
> Arial, and Courier) or integrate FOSS software with online
> font repositories, so that it can offer to look for and
> download a font if the user doesn't happen to have it
> installed on his computer.
> 
> Right now, though, I think it'd be satisfactory if we just
> partnered with Calligra and the Google Docs team to choose
> some fonts to support.
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Sorry for being late;
Don't know much about font licensing, but it seems to me
that for downloading fonts on demand (repository) there's
yet another type of licence needed. Maybe it's just a
supplementary clause to their existing license, similar to
AGPLv3 which is a GPLv3 with a special paragraph for online
use. There are license types like SIL Open Font License
(OFL) and likely some others. Someone probably knows more
about this.
Better to get it clear/right from the start because I think
font embedding such as @font-face in CSS will become the
norm for many types of documents, thus leading to the users
will become used to automatically getting all missing fonts
from the web.

Concerning fonts for templates, I'd understand if some will
oppose integration the Microsoft-backed fonts (Arial, Times
New Roman, etc.); there are restriction on their usage. But
a general user does not give a shit about that argument.

In addition to the fonts already mentioned on the
Call_for_Templates page [1] I can imagine a few:

Junicode (very complete glyphs for Asian/other scripts)
Droid (designed for tablets/phones)
Linux Biolinum/Libertine (Liberation family-tree)
Gentium
Fava Black (an impact-type font)
Chopin Script (calligraphy)

This is without having a clue about their licensing for
download-on-demand, they are mostly OFL I think.
I've tested most of them in various software, including
Scribus, which is quite picky about quality (hinting and such).

Thanks Mirek for your dedication to these matters.

Best regards,
Sveinn í Felli

[1]
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Call_for_Templates