[Freefont-devel] Various freefont problems

[Panayotis Katsaloulis]

Most of the problems reported here dealing with the greek language has
to do with the situation of version mismatch between the freefonts
found in Debian and the original tree found in the old freefont
packages.

The fonts which are now in alioth should not have any problems because
they have been taken after by me a couple of months ago.
Still, we can not use them directly because there are spacing problems
having to fo with fontforge (which is not able to properly calculate
the default vertical distance for a couple of reasons).

Unfortunately someone has to contact the authors of fontforge and talk
with them about this problem.


On Sat, 5 Mar 2005 18:49:00 +0300, Alexej Kryukov <akrioukov@newmail.ru> wrote:
> 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
> 
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panayotis@panayotis.com