[OpenFontLibrary] What licenses do we accept?

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mercredi 15 juillet 2009 à 22:58 +0300, Khaled Hosny a écrit :

> I'm not sure in what sense using Type1 fonts would screw up the rest of
> the system. TeX fonts has always been a different territory, and aren't
> supposed to integrate with the rest of the system anyway. 

Shipping fonts *does* have a cost, at least licensing audit size, and
the TeX community has not risen to this challenge in the past. So it
falls up to general-purpose font packagers like me to do the work. And
we're bloody not going to do it for something that refuses to integrate
(or leave it in while it goes against objectives every one else takes
pain to achieve).

(also the mirroring people are not happy to see a huge volume of fonts
duplicated in TeX land because of this non-integration).

> Technically
> speaking, TeX is frozen and will never get updated, Even though new
> TeX-based engines support OpenType (XeTeX and LuaTeX), there still
> people who aren't willing to switch, for valid reasons, and will keep
> use those "obsolete" formates.

Well, those people will look for their software where they look for
openmotif today for example. Distribution standards are evolving for the
better (both technically and legally), and they take pains to ease the
transitions for legacy software to a point, but components that refuse
to change won't be waited for forever. They'll get dumped, if only
because people who do the work refuse to touch them anymore, and people
who do the work are the first to insist on some minimal standards.

>  So, distros have either to support these
> use scenarios or screw up their users, it is up to them.
> 
> And as Type1 is a valid font formate (I just checked, and my GTK+ apps
> can use it) and I don't see a point for OFLB not to support it.

There are many things possible in OpenType but not in Type1, Type1 fonts
tend not to follow conventions that evolved in OpenType because of the
mess Type1 was (Type1 naming tends to be application-unfriendly), and
many apps do not work with Type1 (they don't always work with OpenType
CFF either but at least their upstreams are working on support while
Type1 is not a target nowadays). Mid-term, I don't think many Type1
fonts will stay acceptable without changing. Not because they'll have
become worse, but because the standards will have risen.

I know our xorg guy asks me every six months if we still have Type1
fonts in Fedora so he can drop Type1 logic. So far the answer has been
“we still have some Type1 fonts people really care about” but at some
point it will change to “our complement of TTF/OTF fonts is large enough
and good enough we can junk the remaining Type1 fonts and the code that
supports them, people have been warned long enough to move to OpenType,
those who haven't are hopeless now¹”

If you are maintaining some Type1 fonts you care about please budget in
conversion to OpenType while it can still be done gracefully outside
crisis mode. Please.

¹ Actually the only remaining showstopper nowadays are ghostscript
fonts, and the only reason they're a showstopper is because GUST is
being stupid about licensing issues, or we'd have already made TeX Gyre
our default implementation of gs fonts, with app people asked to make
sure they can use them instead of the PS1 versions.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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