[Freefont-devel] Various freefont problems

[Alexej Kryukov]

Dear freefont developers, 

I was very glad to hear that the freefont project started sometime
by Primoz Peterlin is now revived at alioth.debian.org. Unlike the
original font package still available at savannah.gnu.org, new
fonts contain less critical bugs and are almost really usable. However,
I still couldn't make FreeSerif my default font for Cyrillic/Greek
text due to some problems I want to discuss here.

First, in the 1.2 version glyph metrics for some combining diacritics
were changed in order to make them really combining (i. e. with a
negative left sidebearing). Well, that's nice, but now these
diacritics look misplaced in all accented characters (mainly Latin)
which contain references to them. As far as I can see, there was
no activity in the project during the last 3 monthes; does it mean
that nobody has noticed this problem or nobody is interested in
fixing it? I think this is a serious bug which needs to be
solved as soon as possible.

Second, the Polytonic Greek part of the font is still unusable
due to negative sidebearings of all capital accented glyphs, which
cause the accent to overstrike a preceding character (and the
prosgegrammeni produces the same effect for the next character
as well). Is it possible to fix this?

Third, am I right that most Greek glyphs are taken from pfb
files by Yannis Haralambous? If so, it would be nice to
accomplish FreeSerif with some missing glyphs which, however,
are present in OmegaSerif, curly beta in particular.

And, finally, I think it would be nice to have prepackaged
otf and ttf font files available for download from the project
page. Not all users are smart enough to inspect CVS, and not
all can read modern Greek in order to download the fonts
from graphis.hellug.gr (BTW, the "stable" ttfs currently available 
from that page are *very* buggy; neither FontForge nor FontLab
can even read them).

If my own efforts can be useful for fixing the problems I've
listed, I am ready to participate in the project myself. Although
I am not a font designer, at least I know how to manipulate
glyphs in FontForge...

-- 
Regards,
Alexej Kryukov <akrioukov at newmail dot ru>

Moscow State University
Historical Faculty