Re: [Freefont-bugs] Willing to help

[Primoz PETERLIN]

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On Thu, 15 May 2003, Panayotis Katsaloulis wrote:

> > I've noticed that there exists a user "teras" with a real name equal
> > to yours, so if you can confirm this is indeed you I will make it a
> > developer.
> Yes, that's me :)

You have been added as a developer with R/W CVS access.

> Well, for start I'll try  to add the missing ancient greek
> (accented) characters in Serif and SansSerif, since this is something
> that we urgently need in Greece (to display "polytonika" texts), and as
> a second step the various archaic symbols.

Excellent. One of the goals I have set for 2003 is to make Free UCS fonts
compliant to Multilingual European Subset Level 2, and polytoniko fits
perfectly in this scheme.

> About the coptic symbols, although it is in the "greek" character set, I
> am not directly interested for the time being (these symbols are for
> newer papers) and I don't know if I'll do it right now.

It looks we will have to wait for a genuine Copt, then. :)

> The thing that I'd like to comment is that I tried to load the font,
> make the changes and save the font again. Then I "diff"ed the two files
> in order to send the differencies. The problem is that I have a bunch of
> differencies like
>
> $ diff new/ old/
> ---
> > Encoding: 64314 64314 3221
> 111721c112109
> < Encoding: 64315 64315
[...]
> This is repeated for every provided glyph. Since I don't want to change
> anything on the original glyphs, is this any special parameter in
> pfaedit I should set? Or a special option?

I believe that newer versions of PfaEdit use a somewhat different format
of SFD. PfaEdit seems to do this automatically, so I wouldn't worry too
much about it. The only dangerous situation I can imagine is to have a
merged file which is neither completely in the old format, nor completely
in the new format. To prevent it, I have updated the files in the CVS
repository, which are now completely in the new format.

> One more thing I'd like to ask is the distance I am supposed to leave
> between glyphs (excuse me if you find this question naive). Some
> grek letters have accents in front or behind them. What is the proper
> distance to define for these characters? Should the glyph be wide enough
> to occupy the letter together with the accents,  or (the default) the
> width is only the width of the letter?

I count on you to decide on that! :)

In a more serious way - I would need a more detailed knowledge of Greek to
decide on that. If they mostly appear in the beginning of words, the
accents can hang over to the left. If not, they should probably better be
counted in to make the glyph. The details can be left to kerning. Speaking
of which, the whole Greek area (basic and extended) lacks kerning
altogether.

> I have a proposition also: you probably know Thryomanes font. As I can
> see it is released under GPL (just like these fonts, right?)
> Why don't you include this font inside the package?

Actually, I must admit I didn't know it. :} Now, having a quick look at
it, I have several concerns about its use:

* it is similar in design to Times (and thus Free Serif), but not quite
the same. I don't have my Rookledge's Typefinder at hand right now to see
which typeface would resemble Thryomanes best, but I am afraid the
differences are just sufficient to be disconcerting.

* most Type 1 fonts are designed on a grid 1000 points square,
while TrueType fonts are designed on a grid 2048 points square (this has
something to do with using quadratic splines rather than cubic). As we are
using the 1000 points grid for historic reasons (= because all of our
sources do so :), TrueType fonts have to be rescaled and repositioned,
which requires manual work.

* apart from polytoniko (which can be handled automatically to a large
degree), Thryomanes outdoes us in the Latin Extended-B and IPA ranges. You
might be interested to know that some 16 months ago, Free Serif included
these glyphs from the Omega project, but I removed them on Yannis
Haralambous' request, because he wasn't happy with them and had new ones
in preparation (see the diff between 0.1 and 0.2 in the CVS repository).
The preparation obviously took a tad longer than expected (I will ask him
on EuroTeX in Brest this June what is the current status), but I count on
getting these glyphs again from the Omega project.

With kind regards, Primoz

- --
Primož Peterlin,   Inštitut za biofiziko, Med. fakulteta, Univerza v Ljubljani
Lipičeva 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija.  address@hidden
Tel +386-1-5437632, fax +386-1-4315127,  http://biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si/~peterlin/
F8021D69 OpenPGP fingerprint: CB 6F F1 EE D9 67 E0 2F  0B 59 AF 0D 79 56 19 0F
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